THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN WHO SWALLOWED A FLY

THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN WHO SWALLOWED A FLY
Theo and I have put our names down on “the list” so perhaps we can buy cheap property when De Beers sells off the town of Kleinzee. It’s the perfect place for us to some day start up a little pub serving Theo’s nibblies and I could carry on dabbling in my efforts to find different things to do with all the seaweed and salt around here. I’ve smoked chunks of salt rock crystals, for culinary uses not in a roll up. It adds good flavour to food although I hope it’s not enhanced with guano or pickled miggies. I’m drying the Nori seaweed by spreading in out on my hammock in the sun, then roasting it for a few minutes drizzled with peanut and sesame oil. Then you crumble it and add it to your food as you would a spice. It tastes frigging awesome. I’ve made a good soup / seafood stock with fresh chopped Gigartina radula (that’s the stuff which looks like flappy rough riders), a dash of red wine, onions and stock. Yummy. Even Theo is impressed with my experimental dishes lately. I’m not serving him slimy green snot anymore but he draws the line at letting me wrap him in fresh seaweed then making him soak in a bath with lumps of natural salt drifting around blobs of jelly slime. Nor does he like my salted seaweed glycerine soap. It doesn’t lather so he can’t make soapy Mohicans between his nuts in the shower. People pay a fortune to go to health spas for a treatment which I’m offering for free.

One of the planned projects for Kleinzee is a frail care retirement village around the currently deserted little hospital. I fear the grannies who move in might have a hard time adjusting to this wild environment. Besides the confusing lonely robot (traffic light) stuck on the wall outside Spar, they could get blown all the way to the Port if they went for a stroll down to the beach. Dodging the wild ostriches patrolling the dunes in search of shiny things to eat and the odd fat fur seal sunning themselves on the beachfront could line them up for a pacemaker. I’ve never seen or heard of ostrich roadkill but it’s a strong possibility out here in Kleinzee and according to the manne, a true South African man has to eat his roadkill. You are expected to skin it and cook it on a fire right there on the roadside or in the unlikely event that you don’t have a bag of wood in your boot, you have to cook the meat on the cars manifold and eat it later when you arrive at your destination. Trying to wedge a dangly ostrich under your hood could be tricky I reckon.

You might have noticed that I’m becoming a bit blazѐ about hunting, me being a bit of a softie when it comes to cute furry animals and all. Well, truth is, I’ve come to grips with the fact that man is a hunter gatherer by nature. I’ve joined the good natured West coast toppies down at the abattoir for a brandy and coke (strange place for drinks you might think) when they slaughter their meat for the month (the same stuff which you buy in styrofoam bakkies from Pick ‘n Pay) and I haven’t blinked an eyelid. These guys aren’t one bit gungho and don’t swagger around with a rifle over their shoulder proclaiming their manhood. In fact they prefer free range or organic meat as apposed to eating animals penned in a cage the size of its body. Bottom line is I no longer feel like a barbarian devouring flesh when I eat meat.

I’ve really been industrious lately and quite enjoying myself. I’ve made a batch of green fig preserve and green fig jam which is a moerse lot of PT. I’m wondering how many wasps I will be eating as a by-product. The whole wasp fig tree relationship is nogal quite interesting. Did you know that fig trees go back as far as 80 million years ago and that each species (about 750) fig tree only has one species of wasp which is able to pollinate it. They therefore rely on each other for reproduction. Fig trees must have been pretty common back in Adam and Eve’s days cos Adam used a fig leaf as a loin cloth. They probably were originally vegans munching on things like pears and apricots, peaches, melons, basically everything to make a fruit salad except apples until that fateful day. Adam wouldn’t have had any animal skin lying around to cover up his suddenly exposed manhood so a fig leaf had to do. Maybe it was the result of strenuous hard work getting a soap tree to lather up (after eating a Granny Smith) and resulted in more than a hairy Mohican. But I digress from my wasp story. In most cases a female wasp squeezes herself through the tiny hole in the fig, her legs transferring fig pollen to the flowery seeds inside as she squeezes in, leaving a trail of now useless body parts. Her wings and antenna break off, and I bet she gets a tight facelift as she wedges through the tiny opening, then she lays her eggs and dies with a grin from ear to ear so to speak. That’s assuming she chose a male fig tree, otherwise she just dies and you get to eat a mouthful of dried up pregnant wasp on your jam sarmie. If things go well, the eggs hatch, they grow and the wingless males have a good time in the dark fig with all the females then they spend the remainder of their life trying to burrow an escape route for the pollen covered females to bugger off so that they can die in peace while the life of fig trees carry on as they have for millions and millions of years.
Now that the Biology class is over I’m off to swallow a spider to catch a fly and everything else living inside my stomach. I don’t know why.


Miggies- migges / dam nuisance flying bug
Manne – main guys
Toppies – old guys
Moerse – a hell of a lot of
Bakkies - container
Nogal – actually