As the Stomach Turns (If you can remember which TV programme that line comes from, you’ve scored Brownie points)


Our daily life here in Qolora is not that different to life back in Cape Town, well other than logistics and a few finer details like earth, wind, fire and water. Otherwise life here is pretty similar to being in the concrete jungle. For instance, on washing days my UDD (underarm dingle dangle) flaps around vigorously as I manually spin my very upmarket Sputnik washing machine through its wash and rinse cycle. The makeshift table which develops a life of its own when the Sputnik is in full swing, tries desperately to worm its way down the hill in pursuit of the goats, with me in tow. To stabilize everything, I have to pin the table down with my foot, hold the machine in place with my left hand and spin like mad with the right. I get an upper body workout without having to fork out gym fees. I don’t mind carrying pots of boiling water and traipsing back and forth to the garden tap and in fact I consider myself lucky that I don’t have to hunch over a bucket or make a fire to boil the water.

We also have baking days. How else do you think we get bread? As long as it’s not windy, we can fire up Theo’s “boer maak ‘n plan” oven. He gave a 25 litre thinners drum a facelift by cutting the lid off to become to door which we open or close with a pair of pliers. He rammed a wire rack inside and tada. He makes a fire underneath, adds extra coals on top and our oven is set to go. So long as it’s not too windy so that the coals blow away. On those days Theo cooks pap or flapjacks inside. I’ve even baked biscuits and an end of the month version of lasagne using macaroni and soya in our eye level oven. We save a fortune on oven cleaner!!

The upside of living in our cosy rondavel is that there’s no major housework to do. There is a downside to living in one room though. Being woken up at 3 in the morning by a roving beam of light sweeping across the room similar to a police raid, can be disturbing. When Theo wakes up in the middle of the night he tiptoes to the kitchen corner so as not to wake me and with his head torch on full beam, he scans the shelves looking for ingredients to cook dishes such as curry afval. The first time the swooping lights woke me, I ducked my head under the blankets, fearing the inevitable. We all know the aliens will arrive some day and I thought this was it. The body snatchers were hovered above our hut scanning for my perfect vessel to be beamed up and used for reproduction and probably they’d stick probes with flashing lights up my bum. But then the smell of Theo’s afval wafted up my nostrils and I knew I still had more time on Earth before I was needed elsewhere.

Our rondavel roof is propped up with a centre pole (which is actually off centre) but unfortunately it’s too gnarly to wrap my limber self around for pole dancing. I’d consider climbing it and doing a swan dive onto our wobbly bed if the woodwork was not so rickety. Someone has mounted a ceiling fan (which is not connected to electricity) in the most peculiar way up at the top of said pole. I’m not sure which came first - the fan or the pole but the intriguing device will never serve to cool anyone down. I’m posting a picture of it.

Most days we can collect water down at the garden tap and we’ve run a 40 m cable from across the way for electricity so what can I say, we’re pretty comfortable.

Now I’m off to mix some dugga from mud and water as I’ve seen the mammas doing around here. That’s how you repair a leaking grass roof it seems and ours drips when it rains. Oh well at least we wont have to budget for handyman call out fees.

Lately there are just not enough hours in a day to get to everything but I’m as happy as a tick on a cow.

Grannies, Gastronomy and Grammar

Those three words sum up my last year in Cape Town.  Squatting at my mother’s house and getting to know the old ducks who regularly pop in for tea and cake or line dance classes, summed up my whole social life.  Well, other than befriending a retired gay drama queen and an Arab at the market.  The innocent pill popping grannies are ever so sweet but I think Theo’s endurance for endearment was sometimes pushed to the limit since he was the only male in the never ending stream of senior citizens doing the forward rock side step line dance movement through the house.  Anyway, you don’t put your balls on the line when residing with 2 geriatrics, being my perfect mother & her perfect sister, and little ol’ me, not quite perfect but close enough to perfection without being called conceited.

The “hyena club” as we referred to the screeching grannies, watched in fascination as Theo banged pots and pans around the kitchen, wielding his metre long butcher knife through the air, trying hard to miss (or not) a purple shrouded head inquisitively leering over his shoulder.  Other days the liquidizer worked overtime in his attempt to drown out their shrill cackles as they planned my mothers next aptly named chatterbox meeting. 

Mornings, my mother and aunt, clad in fluffy nightdresses, clutching their crossword puzzles and Sudoku, which they adamantly slogged over for 2 hours every morning in bed in their attempt to keep their brains alert for the day, would have to sample Theo’s kitchen concoctions.  My mother, I suspect, hid hers in her collection of chocolate papers when Theo wasn’t looking since she assumed that everything he cooked contained either innards or curry and there was no way she was going to eat anything which she didn’t recognise.  Rosemary on the other hand, who didn’t recognise anything other than a peanut butter sandwich, would swallow the foreign morsels, pinky in the air, and in her ever so frightfully English accent would murmur “Well Theo, I don’t quite know what that was but it was terribly tasty”.

Occasionally Theo would surprise my mother by leaving a pigs head in the fridge in the hopes that she would have a heart attack and move on to better pastures but over time she became immune to finding chilli splashed up her once immaculate tiled walls, seaweed in the bottom of her toaster, jars of sprouts growing in the cupboards between her colour coded coffee cups and mouldy cheese maturing to a nice blue klunky aroma in her dresser.  Theo on the other hand was bewildered by her shiny doll size pots to heat her little portions of frozen peas (kept on the bottom left hand front corner in the freezer) to have with her little packet of plastic sauce (kept in the tupperware box, bottom shelf, middle kitchen cupboard, 4 inches from the left) and her little portion of frozen chicken schnitzel from a little box kept on the top freezer shelf, front right parallel to the frozen bread 3 inches from the frozen chocolate mouse.

During the year, Theo and I traded at markets to fulfil his obsession with food.  We entered the slow food market, Theo moving a bit slower than me, once he discovered the organic brewed beer.  We sold seaweed products which I proudly put together in my mothers kitchen of course, while Theo whipped up a few divine potjies, originating in said kitchen of course.  Our weekly sales at the Saturday market didn’t quite bring home the bacon so we switched to fast food, hit the road to a few festivals where Theo fried corn dogs to feed the other 99% of the nation; the ones who weren’t bothered with things like gluten free or organic but who clutched each other closely as they whirled their way across hay strewn dance floors to De La Rey and Rooi Rokkie.

Along the way, we collected a shitload more utensils and dishes, pots and pans and things which we squeezed into every spare orifice in my mothers neatly organised kitchen cupboards.   

Inbetween chopping pigs tails and forcing wads of dry seaweed into my mothers liquidizer, we decided to study English.  We ploughed through a TEFL course (teaching Englsh as a foreign language) in the hopes that we could do a spot of humanitarian work in rural villages in our travels to wherever and do something uselful with our time other than cooking. 

Then Kyro moved in, also to save money, and our calm household of 2 perfect, 1 graciously close to perfect women, and one frustrated husband turned into chaos.  Our procrastinated plans to save up to drive our camper truck to Zambia became easier to procrastinate about as we had other things to keep ourselves occupied.  A wedding needed to be planned.  Not just your everyday wedding either.  Kyro, our adventurous son, announced that he was getting married to a Japanese girl who he had fallen madly in love with after skyping her via the internet for the last year.  After sitting down with a bottle of whiskey, we realised that he was serious and we were about to gain a foreign dauguter in law who lived across the ocean in a place where tofu, earthquakes and Tsunamis were everyday things. 

But that’s another whole saga on its own.