Horror's Story Part 2

Two Storey Siesta

This is our eleven year old cat Horry. I last wrote about her, when we thought she had only a couple of weeks left to live. We'd taken her to the vet, when she started losing her balance and dragging her back legs. He did some tests, ruled out diabetes and thought it was probably a tumour, which would be expensive to diagnose conclusively and more than likely incurable. So we brought her home to live out her days in peace. She couldn't jump any more but would claw her way onto a lap if we didn't pick her up when requested and her purr was louder than ever. She spent a lot of time lying outside come rain or shine, was feisty as ever and relieved herself in the shower at night!

Five months later, she is still very much here, still purring and choosing this sunny spot to siesta. She seems slightly better, though still very wobbly and not able to jump successfully. The shower has been used as a litter tray less frequently recently too. Yes we did try putting an actual litter tray in there for her. She chose to poo in the shower and sleep in the litter tray, so we abandoned the idea... it was rather gritty underfoot!

Youngest has adopted her of late. Horry, in her less agile state, is far less aloof than she used to be in her prime and consents to being carried around and tucked up in boxes. We were sitting at supper a couple of days ago and youngest got down in the middle of the meal, without a word, to return a few minutes later. I asked where she'd been.

"To let Horror out"

"Out of where?" I enquired in slight apprehension.

"Out of the box."

A short lecture ensued on not shutting animals up in boxes that they couldn't get out on by themselves, though I did remember to praise her for remembering to let her out again. I went to check on Horry and gently lifted her out of her encarceration in the wooden-lidded tuck box. She promptly struggled straight back in. Why wouldn't she? She was cosily ensconced on Youngest's pillow in a nice warm, secure place, if the lid was down, that just made it cosier!

Youngest does everything she can to entice her onto her bed at night. In keeping with her contrary cat nature, Horry prefers to curl up on middle daughter's pillow, where she is not at all welcome. After being thrown off without ceremony, she'll settle in the box of clothes at the end of her bed until, in the night, she can creep back on and tuck in next to her legs. It must be her obstinate nature that has kept her going this long despite the vet's pessimistic prognosis.

Spring Decorating

It's time to brighten up my blog with a little colour today, in honour of the spring. Never mind that a cold front is bringing in more rain today and snow is forecast on the mountains for Wednesday - yesterday it was definitely spring.

After cooking Sunday lunch for family and friends, I drifted around outside in the sunshine and light breeze, photographing the new spring flowers. I've got some lovely, soft, flower images for A Flower Gallery, which I'll put up once I've played with them a bit, but here is one especially for my blog, showing the delicate pastel colours of the pypie, a wild South African gladioli, with our straw bale house in the background.

Pypie

Another splash of colour comes from Planet Nomad, as edj kindly passed me on one of these:

I know that some of you have got them already, and some of you are on holiday frolicking in the mountains or on beaches but I'd like to pass one on anyway to
Jenny at Prairie Farmeress, Charlotte at Charlottes Web, Jeanne at Cooksister and Meredith at Poppy Fields who all rock!

Spring Chorus

A showery day sprinkled with signs of spring, rainbow arching protectively over us as we walk around the farm exclaiming over the latest flower arrivals. The almond blossom burst out last week and now the tall pypies, South African wild gladioli, are coming out to join the chorus, mauve, purple and magenta flags among the restios. The first babjantjies were spotted just now by my sharp-eyed middle daughter, their deep blue trumpets hugging close to the ground, heavy with the scent of massage oils. Watsonias of all shades of flame are beginning to flower and my sister in law's coral tree has its scarlet blooms lighting it up for the first year ever. The proteas have been out for the last few weeks and are now prolific enough to cut and bring into the house in their fiery shades of orange and pastel pinks.

Our walk was punctuated every few yards by exclamations and summons to the others to come and look - the girls of the family on spring flower alert - my two sisters-in-law, my two daughters and me, voices carrying in the still air between showers, breathing in the damp air full of growing smells, then hurrying to take cover at the nearest house as the next shower hits us. Returning home with a pocket full of pine cones to use as fire lighters, a posy of the more profuse of the flowers and damp feet and knees from bending down to smell the flowers. It's spring time in South Africa!

Flower Pictures

I've been taking a trip down memory lane, re-sizing all my flower pictures for our stock photography library at A Flower Gallery. Long long ago before the children were born, in the days when we still used film in our cameras, I spent a while photographing flowers in our studio, setting up shots with lighting and backgrounds, processing the transparency and having the best ones printed onto canvas. This brief flurry of creativity is now immortalised in the image galleries of A Flower Gallery and a few framed pictures adorn the walls of family and friends. I made a few sporadic attempts to get back into it after the children were born, using daylight, but small children and concentrated creative endeavour don't go well together and my flower photographer hat got put away on the shelf to gather dust.

My digital camera has liberated the creativity again recently, but set up studio shots still elude me. I take a more immediate gratification, instant capture approach and, with digital not costing a thing, can experiment more. I still feel an affection for my cornflower shot above though, product of days when a couple of hours playing around with a single shot was not only possible, it was called work!

Dinner

My husband's birthday dinner was ten days ago now and I still haven't posted about it. I was sure that such a ground-breaking event as my cooking a three course dinner for adults only, would have leapt to my blog, with hardly a pause for thought. Sadly it seems that the creative effort of the cooking left me dry of words and the food blogger in me abandoned ship, when I realised that we'd eaten all the food without me having taken a single photo of it. I hurriedly snapped one leftover tart after the meal before my husband and his friend in clear-up mode finished it off, but with no daylight and only on-camera flash the result was unworthy of its delicious subject.

I'd been mulling over the menu for a week or two, with no real progress, except to establish that the main course was to be Thai Green Curry. I wanted to celebrate this child-free meal by cooking things that they don't like, which are hardly ever cooked in this one-meal-fits-all family. So a bit of spice for the main course. The dessert sprang into mind as I remembered the naartjie sorbets served in their skins, that I'd made a few months ago. I'd thought at the time that they needed an intense chocolate sensation to follow, so the search was on for a suitable recipe. Who else but Nigella would I turn to for this? In Feast I found what I was looking for - her Chocolate Espresso cake. That left a suitably elegant starter to think of. In the freezer I had one roll of the wonderful organic puff pastry that a friend brought, so that was to be a base - my tastebuds played with ideas and came up with a layer of the vegetarian tapenade from Kloovenberg with baby tomatoes halved and a scattering of basil. Menu sorted in the nick of time.

I made the naartjie sorbets two days ahead to get them out of the way, sticky business as it always seems to be. The chocolate cake I set to the evening before, never having made this sort of cake before. It's one where you melt the butter and chocolate together, whisk the eggs with the sugar and fold in the melted mixture, instant coffee and flour. Nigella's recipe asked for the best chocolate and instant espresso powder, mine was going to be a plebs version using dark chocolate of the sort that doesn't declare its cocoa solid percentage and Nescafe. Slight qualms furrowed my brow as I mixed it all together into a suspiciously pale batter. The batter tasted OK but how could it possibly transform into the dark delight shown in the sumptuous illustration of Feast? Had I ruined it with cheap-skate ingredients? Relief when I took it out of the oven an hour later, beautifully risen and dark as night, with an appetising aroma that promised riches. It sank as it cooled to form a dense chocolatey mass, just right to offset the citrus of the sorbet.

We'd invited two families to the dinner and to sleep over with their children - out where we are it would be callous to send people all the way back to Cape Town after regaling them with dinner - so I'd delegated the children's supper to one family and breakfast the next day to the others, leaving me just the dinner to do. With the dessert sorted in advance, I prepared the thai curry in the morning, whizzing up the paste from scratch from Nigel Slater's recipe, just to make myself feel good. It did feel good with all those unaccustomed herby, spicy scents wafting around the kitchen, like being on a culinary holiday. With the pastry defrosting to be assembled at the last moment, there was nothing left to do for the rest of the afternoon, except make tea and chat . I'd over-organised myself - felt I should be rushing around cooking as my raison d'etre, but I'd left nothing to do but force myself to relax, the hardest thing of all!

The children were fed and allowed to watch a DVD while we had our starter, then dispatched to bed. The boys had pulled all their mattresses upstairs for their own sleepover and our friend's daughter took over our son's bed to create a girls' sleepover downstairs. We closed the door and concentrated on grown-up conversation.

The pastry starters turned out brilliantly, crisp flaky pastry, salty tang of olive, sweet burst of roast tomatoes and green freshness of basil. The curry was also good, the men attacked the leftover curry paste to add more kick to theirs, even though more delicate palates found it just right! Dessert was the triumph - I had been going to serve the sorbet first, closely followed by the chocolate cake, but by unanimous request we combined the two on one plate, alternating mouthfuls and groaning with pleasure at the intense flavours.

As silence fell at the end of the meal, we became aware that other voices were still chattering. Upstairs two of the boys,, with heavy eyelids were still running through their repertoire of jokes and downstairs youngest was still awake chatting to herself, though the other two girls were fast asleep.

Adult stamina swiftly ebbed away after that and by 10.30 people were departing to bed, though with the promise of more talking and feasting at breakfast the next day.

This could become an annual event and I might even be tempted to repeat the menu verbatim.

South African Milk Tart Recipe

South African Crustless Milk Tart

A couple of days ago, on a winter afternoon, with an over-supply of milk from the weekend about to hit its sell by date, I suddenly had a yen for a nice, creamy rice pudding. The sort that you can throw into the oven and come back to a couple of hours later for a dose of starchy, stomach-warming, central heating.

Long, long ago as students revising for our finals, this was our standby. One of us would assemble the ingredients and chuck it into the oven. Our shabby, student house would be pervaded by the aroma right to the top floor, where I resided in the attic bedroom, lulling us with the promise of a break from our literary tomes. Rice pudding and regular doses of Neighbours were our tranquillisers in those days.

When I tried to recall how we'd made it though, the details escaped me. I know that in England we used a variety of rice that came labeled as pudding rice. A round, short-grained rice that I haven't seen here, and I didn't feel like squandering my precious arborio rice, (which is the nearest equivalent) on a mere pudding. Neither was I sure that my kids would feel the same nostalgic enthusiasm for rice pudding, never having been exposed to it before! One day I will make it for them, I promise, to remind them of their English heritage, but this time I decided to go for the South African spiritual counterpart of rice pudding - Milk Tart.

Milk Tart or Melktert is one of those classic South African dishes, that show up in infinite shades of cream at every social event, where people bring a sweet contribution. At school fund-raisers and tea and cake sales you will find several different versions interspersed with the odd tipsy tart, vetkoek, koeksisters or crunchies for variety.

A pastry case filled with a pale custard filling and speckled with cinnamon, it has a dense creamy texture that is sweet but not sickly, the comfort factor of creamy rice pudding without the bulk. Even my children, who don't go for rich, creamy things, like it and it's a great way of using up that extra pint of milk that is about to go past its sell by date and at the same time getting the kids to up their dairy and calcium intake, without overdosing on cream and fat. It uses half-fat milk not cream so is also a good choice for those who have to avoid cream but are missing the indulgence of it.

The joy of this particular recipe for a Crustless Milk Tart is that it by-passes the need for pastry, the filling going straight into a buttered pie dish and into the oven, so it can be assembled in five minutes, baked for 45 minutes and produce a tea time treat with almost no effort. Also all the ingredients are mixed up in one bowl, or the food processor, leaving very little washing up. I've seen many other traditional recipes that demand that you whisk egg yolks and whites separately then fold in, but this way is already so delicious that there seems to be no need, unless you are looking for entertainment! This version is perfect for afternoons when you have a thousand other things to do and unexpected visitors show up for tea, or when you just feel the need for comfort food on a cold winter's afternoon.

Crustless Milk Tart Recipe

¾ cup / 185ml self-raising flour
2 cups / 500ml milk
2 eggs
¾ cup / 185 ml sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 oz / 25g melted butter
pinch salt
½ tsp cinnamon

Put all the ingredients together into a bowl or food processor and beat to a smooth batter. Pour into a buttered pie dish (approximately 23cm/9" in diameter, but it doesn't matter if it's not exact, the finished tart will just be either a bit deeper or shallower). Sprinkle the cinnamon over the top. Bake for 45 minutes at 175C / 350F. Serve warm or cold. It sinks and becomes denser as it cools. If you eat it hot you'll need a spoon to scoop up the soft custardy tart but cold you can pick up the slices in your hand, if it hasn't vanished long before then.

Happily the milk tart was a tremendous success - this was the first time I'd made it myself from my sister-in-law's recipe. All three children guzzled as much as they were allowed, I sneaked an extra piece too and felt almost the same level of carbohydrate comfort that our student rice puddings provided. The only thing missing was that crusty spicy skin that you either fight over or loathe. If anyone has a foolproof, effortless rice pudding recipe for me, I would love to subject my children to it one day soon!

OK, so they don't really look in need of a winter warmer, but they are working very hard!

P.S. In case those of you with wet summers are about to lynch me for this sunny winter picture, it is actually raining again today and we'd just had five whole days of rain before the sun shone and liberated my laundry from the ever expanding heap in the bathroom.

Edited to add: I thought I would submit this to Johanna's Sugar High Friday event - the theme is 'sweet specialities' and I'm taking it upon myself to see that South Africa's puddings are adequately represented, so this Milk Tart and this Malva Pudding will fly the flag for SA along with Jeanne's Peppermint Crisp Fridge Tart.

Game Ranger or Chef?

Our nine year old son has wanted to be a game ranger for a long time now, since Animal Planet came into his life when he was about five (before that he wanted to be a pilot). Last week after they had been watching Aladdin, my husband asked the children what three wishes they would ask for, if a Genie appeared in their lives. Our son gave serious consideration to the question.

His first request was to have the materials he needed to make all the projects in his The Science and History Project Book. This is a brilliant book that a friend of his had. He requested it for his birthday present and has been browsing through ever since. It has hundreds of different things you can make, from rockets out of plastic bottles, volcanoes with bicarb, flour and vinegar, suits of armour and foods from different cultures and times in history.

Next after due thought he said he'd like to be a great artist. He gave me more details later. Though he likes the painting he does at school, it's a bit too simple and he'd like to learn to paint like Grandpa, doing very detailed watercolours.

The third wish he would use to set the genie free, like Aladdin did.

Our hearts swelled with parental pride at this mature and considered disposal of his imaginary wishes!

On Thursday, as I was wrestling in the kitchen with some naartjies to make clever naartjie sorbets for the upcoming birthday dinner, he came and sat down with something on his mind. The great question was, what did he need to do to become a game ranger and if he went to college to do that, could he also study to be a great artist? Plus he thought he'd like to open a shop to sell all the things he was going to make from his Science Project Book. If he was working as a game ranger, would his boss let him open a shop right there, so he could keep an eye on the shop while he was working? Then maybe in his holiday time he could do his art. How much holiday did I think he would get as a game ranger? And what would he need to know to run a shop? He thought that even children who were just used to plastic guns from big toy shops would find something they liked in his shop, maybe the suits of armour and swords.

We had a half hour conversation on his career aspirations. I think he has the makings of an entrepreneur, as by the end of it he had shops in several different countries with managers and a team of people that he'd trained to make enough things to sell. My husband then threw some more ideas into the mix, that maybe he'd like to make wild-life films and earn enough to buy his own game farm, then he could open his shop there and sell to his visitors.

He also has the makings of a chef. He recently rediscovered his Cooking with Herb - Herb the Vegetarian Dragon cook book, that he loved when he was small. His grand plan was to cook something from it for Dad's birthday dinner, maybe the spaghetti sandwich or the strawberry slush. My elegant dinner plans were preserved by a diplomatic suggestion from Dad, that he would like him to cook supper on his actual birthday, just for the family and that maybe he could find three recipes for Dad to choose from. This was duly done and the menu decided - Dragonian Quesadillas with spicy tomato salsa. It didn't matter that he doesn't like tomatoes, he was doing this recipe for Dad and maybe he'd try a bit. I questioned the availability of tortillas in our neck of the woods. He reassured me. There was a recipe for them in his Science Project Book.

So yesterday, after the birthday cake was disposed of, we got out the recipes to see what we needed to do. The Science Project Book obliged with a recipe for Aztec Tortillas. He duly measured out ingredients, kneaded the dough, carefully divided it into twelve and weighed each piece to see that they were even. Rolling them out thin needed a little help, but he did half of them before handing the rolling pin over to me and getting on with grating the cheese. He came into his own with the frying of the tortillas though, timing them to the second and flipping them with panache.

All this took a lot of time. 'One minute each side for twelve tortillas, that's twenty four minutes, I think supper will be at quarter to seven'. He was right. I swiftly did the salsa for him, mashed some avos for guacamole, as he concentrated on the tortillas. A whole hour and a half of hard cooking and the birthday supper was on the table. The quesadillas were light and crispy, the salsa spicy (just right for Mum and Dad) and he had triumphed!

His next idea is to get up very early and make them for breakfast and take some to school too.

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the baby years, but nine is a whole new voyage of discovery that delights at every turn.

Five More Things Meme

Cooksister tagged me for this meme ages ago, but a rigorous regime of cooking, baking, power cuts, and birthday preparations have kept me from my computer for the last few days. I'll write a full report of the first grown-up dinner party that I've cooked in living memory, soon.

What were you doing 10 years ago?

We were living in our photographic studios in London, running them as hire studios, old warehouses enmeshed in a triangle of train tracks, with a mezzanine for a bedroom and lots of white studio space everywhere else, but no windows to look out of. We were just about to get pregnant with our first child, and rushing over to South Africa as my father-in-law was dying. I was still working on a few walking holidays in Italy each year, the last one to be in September, when having just found out I was pregnant, I was suffering from being 'off food' and so the joys of a gourmet trip in Tuscany were lost to me.

Five snacks you enjoy:

Toast and marmalade
Vegetable crisps
South African rusks
Raisins
Chocolate

Five songs you know all the lyrics to:

Away in a Manger
Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen
Green grow the rushes O
Summer Loving - Grease
I got friends in low places - Garth Brooks

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire:
(I hope this is in pounds, rather than rand, otherwise one million won't cover it!)

Pay off the mortgages of all the immediate family.
Hire a school bus for the high school kids, that I give lifts to, who hitch 25km to school every day.
Visit all my friends and family on a leisurely, luxurious, world tour.
Eat out in all the wonderful restaurants I've been reading about in all your blogs.
Provide some of the buildings that my children's school needs so badly.

Five bad habits:

Procrastination
Escapism
Untidiness
Waiting till the petrol gauge is on red before filling up.
Leaving receipts in my purse till it reaches exploding point

Five things you like doing:

Reading in front of the fire.
Eating good food not cooked by me.
Looking at a distant view.
Baking.
Filling the house with friends and food.

Five things you would never wear again:

Silver lipstick, which gave an unhealthy pallor to the skin though I'm still quite tempted by the silver nail polish that I wore with it.
Stilettos - my feet can't take anything other than comfortable shoes these days.
School uniform - any uniform.
Blouses with ruffles, ruffs and metallic gold thread stripes down them.
Miniskirts, though I'm in complete denial about this as I still have about four of my favourite Jigsaw mini skirts from the early Nineties in a suitcase upstairs.

Five favourite toys:

My Canon digital camera.
My blog.
Secateurs - pruning is my best bit of gardening and the only thing I do consistently.
Astrology books - western and Chinese, I find it all intriguing.
Crystals - from trips to the Scratch Patch with the kids, that sit in my pocket, smooth and polished for my fingers to turn over - right now it's a gorgeous piece of blue lace agate with delicate lacy stripes.

A Cluttered Mind

Two things resonated with me from this post of Charlotte's. The first that she finds it hard to ask for help and expects herself to be able to go it alone and the second the eternal housework dilemma. How, if you're not very good at housework yourself, to train your kids at least to have some idea of keeping the house moderately liveable in?

The asking for help thing is also a big hurdle for me. I always assume that everyone else has enough on their plate already and that the least I can do is sort out my relatively-unimportant-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things troubles without bothering them. So a retreat into a non-communicative comfort zone with general anaesthesia of a nice, undemanding book until I feel better, is my usual response to stress. The current interruption of blog posting, probably reflects my current struggle with the transition from cosy cocoon of stay at home mother, where I'm comfortable and confident in my abilities to bake bread, sew funny things out of felt and kiss things better, to the economic demand that I find my feet again in the strange and scary working world. I'm trying to straddle the two by working from home but it's a slow process building up a freelance business from scratch and it needs a lot of self-confidence to go out there and market yourself. I'm trying to be philosophical and read it as the universe using economic necessity as a kick up the b*m, to make me shift out of a comfort zone and stretch previously unsuspected muscles. Sometimes the philosophy slips though and chocolate and a Katie Fforde are the best recourse.

I love Katie Fforde not least because her blurb claims that her hobbies are ironing and housework but unfortunately she is too busy keeping up with the sitcoms to indulge in them. Her heroines are usually balm to the reluctant housewife, cheerfully untidy and chaotic, which makes me think that she is like that too - we're best friends already.

The divide between the untidy and the very tidy isn't quite so polemical in the blog world as, say, the hectic daycare debate that springs up and ruffles feathers at regular intervals, but there does seem to be quite a bit of sympathetic bonding between fellow messy mavericks, with bewildered incomprehension of the opposite camp.

The joys of house work haven't yet claimed me. I'm one of the clan proud to proclaim that a messy house is a sign of creativity and yet there is always a slightly defensive note to the fanfare. However much I know that I feel more comfortable when the house is looking a bit rumpled, hate it when the book I'm reading gets tidied away and can only find a jumper if it's just where I left it, I still feel that I should be tidier and teach my children to be too. This usually results in a rush of ineffectual clearing up, getting irritated with the kids when my handiwork gets rendered nul and void by another layer of played with detritus, then a surrender to the force majeure of chaos, until the next time my Virgo sun sign asserts itself.

One of Charlotte's commenters suggested a helpful site for the housework-challenged. I visited and perused its pages thinking that maybe I could do some of this, until I read the section of basics which included detailed instructions on how to achieve a shiny sink, involving soaking it in bleach, rinsing it extremely well and ever after drying it tenderly with a cloth after every use...aaaaagh! If I ever invested that much effort in a shiny sink I would be held hostage to it, standing guard over it day and night to ensure that everyone who came near gave it the same TLC. Gone would be the days when the kids could wash their sand-encrusted hands/toys/plates in it and get away with a minor request to use a bucket next time. My fleeting interest in gaining brownie points and becoming a better housewife was abruptly curtailed as I realised the devastating effect it could have on family life. Another of Charlotte's commenters remembered her mother's passion for keeping a clean house and how the children always used go next door to play. I jumped firmly back on to the messy = friendly house bench.

I've settled for decluttering as a means to improve the surface visibility in our house. Decluttering seems to be the Feng Shui of the moment. Getting rid of the excess stuff that is why your house is so untidy in the first place, and trying to change the mentality that makes you hang on to things that you don't use any more, makes more sense to me than spending hours cleaning, only to have it look exactly the same minutes after three kids and four dogs explode into the house. At least decluttering seems to last for a few days.

A mouse visitor in the larder inspired me to try the method. Our larder was getting harder to get into as the pile of stuff at the far end was making a bid to take over the entrance. The counter was overflowing with half used packets of this and that and boxes of empty jam jars filled the storage space. A few hours spent being ruthless on the weekend and I have a gleamingly clear counter space, can see the floor and there is even room for the cats to get in and catch that darned mouse...unfortunately the hall is now cluttered with the excess boxes of jam jars, which I still intend to keep for jam-making in strawberry season, and more boxes destined for the garage with all the recycling..!

Now whenever I need a morale boost I can go and stand at the door to the larder and admire its orderliness, and as long as I keep my back to the hall my halo glows brightly.

Winter Holiday

Winter in London is a long drawn out affair of short dull days and chill, damp weather enlivened by mild, muggy weather with the occasional crisp, frosty day. Snow always a rarity in a city warmed several degrees by the exhaust fumes and central heating systems of its seething masses! The twinkling festivities of Christmas lights give way to the endurance of January and February before brave spring flowers raise hopes of warmer days and sunshine. It is about survival, SAD and battening down the hatches.

Here in the Western Cape of South Africa winter is a more light-hearted affair. The days never get as short as they do in Europe. In between the periods of winter rainfall, (which we welcome as a blessing and insurance against summer drought) we get days of bright sunshine - cold nights and foggy mornings, but then the sun breaks through to tease off our layers of warm clothing, until the children return from school in T-shirts, laden with armfuls of shed clothes.

The Breede River

For some reason we seem more likely to go on holiday in the winter holidays than in the summer. We go to the Breede River with friends and just chill for a few days, pooling the children and the cooking duties, so that everyone gets plenty of time to lie around reading books, fish, eat rock buns and braai. The chill is actually a night time thing, when we huddle in the rather hard beds of a rental house, while the day's warmth exits through the minimally insulated roof until our breath mists. In the morning we stay in bed, with tea, rock bun and book, until the sun penetrates the mist and its warming rays thaw us until we are mellow again.

Fishing rods, rock buns and coffee

The children kept each other busy for hours. The first project they set themselves was to build a house in the reeds, working hard to clear out some dead brush that filled a natural hollow in the reed bed, then forming a cooperative chain gang to cut and stack reeds with which to build extra walls and roof. Our son was in his element, having recently saved up enough money to buy himself a Swiss Army penknife, here was the perfect use for it. Youngest took on the important job of receiving the cut reeds and stacking them neatly, while the others formed the middle of the chain ferrying them from cutter to stacker.


Elaborate 'experiments' with river mud, employed most of the plastic cups in the house.

Fishing with river prawns as bait from the boat and the jetty brought in large quantities of river weed. Luckily the cooks weren't relying on the catch to provide supper.

The river was still and smooth on a winter afternoon, ours the only boat to ruffle its surface. In summer we would have been on a major boat highway, with motorboats and waterskiiers hurtling past and a summer afternoon wind competing for attention. Today it was us disturbing the water birds and the peace of the still winter afternoon.

The background narrative to our four days at the river was Catweazle. I took it along and our friend nobly took it upon himself to read aloud to the children at any time that they needed a little quiet time... or we did. Gales of giggles ripped around the house at Catweazle's confused grappling with the 20th century and a few chuckles emerged from bedrooms where the other adults were pretending to be still asleep. Probably Catweazle was the reason that we didn't catch any fish - a chapter in the boat caused enough uproar to send them fleeing down to the river mouth!

This is the colour of winter at the Breede River - bright aloes set the stony, dry hillsides on fire.

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.

Hell freezing over?

I read this on Ryze.com when I was dutifully networking this morning. It gave our muscles such a great workout, with the gasping and spluttering with laughter that I thought I should share it with you:

The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington Chemistry mid-term.

The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well :

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.

Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, "It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct......leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"

Angel Party

"An angel party " she said, when we discussed her upcoming seventh birthday.

"Fine, that's no problem" I replied.

Then I started thinking about it. How should an angel party be, how would an angel treasure hunt work, what treasure would angel treasure be?

I wandered the shops in search of any little trinket with an angel motif. Nothing. The angels had been knocked out of the running by those pervasive, persuasive fairies. The fairies had taken over the sparkles and shoved the angels into storage, whence they'll emerge triumphantly singing Halleluja, only at Christmas time, which we all know doesn't start till October.

Inspiration was also lacking on the treasure hunt clue front. The fairies of the previous year had had flowers as clues, but I needed angelic inspiration to come up with anything that would pass muster with a group of seven year olds.

I returned to the shops, a bigger centre this time. But forgot my glasses. Eventually tracked down in a craft shop a bag of small charms that could possibly be angels, though without my glasses I wasn't quite sure. Held them at arms length to try and focus better but in the end resorted to accosting another shopper to ask what she thought. She hadn't her glasses either, so passed them to her daughter.

"They're angels and they say Season's Greetings", she replied in a patient tone.

I hadn't been aware of any writing at all. I ditched them, thought laterally and blew the treasure budget on pink and silver chocolate coins, some mini rainbow pens, big shiny marbles and star stickers.

The day before the party arrived and I still hadn't worked out the treasure hunt. I'd decorated some white duck festhers with gold pen to go in the treasure boxes, made origami star boxes to hold the goodies and it all looked pretty, but what would lead them to the treasure? Pirate parties have long stories of buried treasure, army parties have special missions, what do angel parties have?

Eventually my own guardian angel took pity on me and sent inspiration my way. Feathers as clues, each with a gold letter on. The Class 1 children are learning a rhyme for each letter, that they all know, so the rhyme could be the clue. So simple! T is tall, tall tree, D dirty door, G golden goose, R racing rabbit etc. Treasure Hunt sorted.

We watched the Diana concert the night before the Birthday and I cut up paper and gold doilies for the little angels to make their own angel books as a craft activity. I usually just rely on the children to play and have the treasure hunt as the only organised activity, but this time there were a few children who didn't really know each other, so making the angel book was to be an ice-breaker.

The birthday girl herself came up with the Smartie design on her cake, arranging them in the colours of the rainbow, on her actual birthday morning, as I left the baking to the last minute, after having over-faced myself on the treasure and book preparations the day before!

The party went beautifullly, the angels took care of us all and the sun shone, the birthday girl had a wonderful day, with not a tear shed.

Retrograde Inaction

It's useful to have a scapegoat and I can confidently say that it is all Mercury's fault that I haven't posted for a week. Mercury is retrograde at the moment,which I only discovered yesterday, but which explains the series of mixed up phone calls and miscommunications that have been flourishing recently. Mercury is the planet of communication and when it is travelling backwards through the heavens it sends all our communnications awry. That explains the confusing phone call last night when my cell phone rang and a friend started talking about a whole series of arrangements that I knew nothing about. I finally interrupted and said it was me, and it took a little while longer to work out that she'd thought she was answering her phone (to someone else), though I knew it was mine that had been ringing. And another call which my husband answered in a feeble, suffering from a bad cold, grunt to be met with a long, drawn-out groan. He, leaping to worst possible scenario, thought it was his sister in a dire emergency, only to find it was a friend teasing him about his wan voice...he wasn't very amused, even when his heart beat returned to normal! All these tricks that Mercury plays, when it is reversing through our charts..and it is retrograde until the 10th, though the fact that I'm posting again may mean that its influence is becoming less severe!

If you want to read more about its effects from the experts here is an explanation and here are the dates to watch out for.