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

A SOUTIE IN THE SALT MINE

A SOUTIE IN THE SALT MINE
A day in the salt mines here in Kleinzee is literally going off to pick up your own salt directly from mother earth. How freaking awesome is that!
Today we jumped on the XT for a ride down to the deserted yacht club, accompanied for a kilometre or two by a panic stricken steenbokkie who finally dashed off while 7 ostriches ran alongside us, not even 100m away, in their prehistoric-like gait before disappearing over the dunes. The yacht club dam is no longer in use but instead it’s become a salt bay. We were amazed at the fantastic crystals which had naturally built up over time, caking the whole perimeter. We chopped off a whole bunch of salt rocks to take back and now I’m a regte soutie.
It seems people have been using salt since the late stone age. That’s like a moer of a long time ago that people have been using the stuff to preserve food. Fred Flintsone and his tjomma, Barney, probably stood around the braai as they did most nights and as it should be, cooking their Gemsbok steaks, the home brew or magic mushrooms just kicking in and discussing their kill and how it put hairs on a mans chest, back, face and knuckles. Perhaps Wilma was in the cooking area sharing ideas with her sisters about what to do with the left over pieces of hide after making a karos bedspread. By then they would have already been using salt to season their bulbs or other ratatouli veggie dishes since there would have been natural salt pans to be found and being exploratory entrepreneurs, they would have stock piled the stuff for bartering. Maybe that night things got excited as the men chased the women around the braai, dragged them by the hair, you know, the usual foreplay stuff, and maybe that’s when the salt jug fell over onto the wild boar hindleg which Fred was saving for midnight munchies. No-one would have noticed till the next week, what with the rain and the females excited about the new hide mini skirts they were making and the men off hunting and looking for sharp stones to trim their hairy knuckles and to make goatees. And that leg my friend, lying in a salt puddle, could have been the first Parmaham eaten by Neolithic man.
These days salt has got many more functions that just preserving fish, meat and vegetables. For instance it’s used in many descriptive phrases in the Oxford dictionary and the Bible. “The salt of the earth” is a term used to describe these West Coast people. Taken with “a pinch of salt” is probably how you could interpret the story of Little Lotta when she turned back to look at her sinful orgy city and next moment she turned into a pillar of salt.

More salt is used to make pulp, paper, soap, fabric dyes and detergents that actual condiments which only uses 17% of the whole world’s salt. And then its soooo refined and chemically enhanced that it’s hardly of value. Eish now that’s almost like rubbing salt in the wound.
The Chinese were the first recorded people to actually mine the stuff out of the bowels of the Earth. That’s where the really good stuff comes from, deep down, because its been compressed over millions and millions of years and the minerals which salt is made of, being sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium have had enough time to form magical crystals which are full of transmittable energy. So, if you wear a salt crystal around your neck, not only will you never have to eat bland food again cos you could just use your stone necklace like a salt lick, but you could attract all the dust bunnies in your house like a static feather duster and best of all, if there’s a power failure you might still be able to use your washing machine cos salt is charged with electrolytes. I find these electrolytes quite intriguing although I must say it’s all a bit too scientific for me. I never partook in those school experiments using salt and a battery is probably why I don’t get it. Under normal circumstances I’m quite electrically charged. I use to hate opening my car door because I knew a shock was waiting to jar me into reality and then when I got to work another one would be lined up when I closed my car door. Sometimes I tried to avoid the electric surge by shutting the door with my elbow pressed against the window but the charge would remain in my body and catch me out when I opened the toilet door. These days I don’t drive much but I wonder what would happen if put a few of these salt rocks in my pocket and went to work in the bar with the metal fridge door.

Mmm that could give new meaning to a depth charger. OOhhh the thrills of working a day in the salt mines here in Kleinzee are never ending.


Regte soutie – real English through and through
Moer – heck
Tjomma - friends
Braai - barbeque
Karos – leather patch work throw
Eish – Golly gee whizz