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.