Becoming of age

The east wind is up early, but even as it picks up speed, there’s a sense of peace. A bird is calling in the forest. Otherwise, it’s quiet. You can’t even hear the sound of the sea from the vegetable garden. The calm soaks through me, and it strikes me that it’s so far removed from the furore raging in my country. I feel slightly sick.

The old visible in the new

South Africans lived through 48 years of a nightmare in which we were forced by law to centre our existence on racism. By far the most of us never want to go back to that ugly place. But it’s like an infected wound, and it festers.

This time, it has taken an artwork to bring the issues to the fore: not only racism, but also freedom of expression and the deep layers of hurt that still exist. I won’t repeat the saga of the painting dubbed The Spear here, but there are plenty of excellent pieces written about it (try here and here for some of the best). 

The sadness of it all weighs on me – cry, the beloved country, indeed – and I am inclined to lose myself in a corner of my garden. Then the phone rings. It is Kathy: her son, Daniel, is visiting from Cape Town and is ready to make good on my request to “fix” my 29-year-old sailor’s tattoo. Today, if I want. I want.

Meaning

Daniel, you see, is a tattoo artist who is not only outstanding at his art, but also pretty good at reading people. So he recognises that the funny little blue swallow on my arm has meaning for me. 

The artist at work

On a hot February day in Durban, my dear Swiss friend Marcel and I wandered into a tattoo parlour off Grey Street. I chose a swallow for my left arm; he chose a butterfly for his right. An old man with shaky hands did Marcel’s tattoo, wiped his needle on an old rag and then plunged it into me.

That was in 1983, and tattoos were about as anti-mainstream as you could get. The bird, for me, was about freedom and it was a way of saying “screw you” to a mainstream society where apartheid ruled.

Mainstream

Since then, of course, apartheid has gone and tattoos have moved into the mainstream as an art form where cleanliness is supreme. Take Daniel: he’s one of the beautiful people and the intricate tattoos that cover most of his body are true works of arts.

He studies my arm, thinks a while, and produces an image that is perfect for me: a cluster of colourful flowers swirling around the relined swallow. With the help of some wine, Kathy and Bryony’s company, and Daniel’s care, I sit through the hour and a half that it takes. It’s painful, but less so than the pain I experienced in the 15 minutes or so that it took the old man to put the original tattoo on my arm.

More complex

My swallow – my old thumbs-up to freedom – is still there. It’s a lot prettier and somewhat more complex now, as so much good art is. It was only partly a joke when I told a friend that my swallow was growing up.

It makes me think again of the rainbow nation that our beloved Desmond Tutu spoke about: it’s still there and it’s growing up. And growth is seldom painless. We continue finding ways to deal with the hurts and to conquer racism, and sometimes we do it loudly and in chaos. But we do it, and we will do it. We know that we have to. It’s who we are; it’s where we live.

PS: You should be able to view Daniel’s Facebook profile here.

Lemon tree very pretty

My lemon tree, slap bang in the middle of the vegetable garden, is a beautiful sight right now. It’s heavy with fruit and full of buds, too. This lifestyle we’ve chosen means that I actually have to do something with the lemons, though, and not just admire their prettiness and hand out bags to my friends.

What to do with all of these (and more) ...

In fact, I use lemons for all kinds of things. For example:

• Ordinary tap water doesn’t always taste good, so I’ve taken to squeezing the juice of a lemon into a water bottle in the mornings.
• Fresh lemon makes a brilliant cleaner. The low pH of lemon juice gives it antibacterial properties. And it really cuts through grease and dirt. I rub lemon over stainless steel, leave it for a while, wipe it off, and then buff the steel. With salt, it’s also good for cleaning copper and brass – same story: rub it on (the salt is abrasive), let it sit, and then wipe it off and buff.
•  Lemons work like a charm to ease sore throats. Heat up the juice of a lemon with a hefty squeeze of honey. Sip it slowly. The high levels of vitamin C help, too. 

Best place to store them

A glut

But even with all of that, I am still faced with a glut, so I start scratching around for ideas. I get pointed to making lemon curd, but the recipes call for four lemons and five eggs. That’s not going to make the tiniest dent on the mound. I will attempt lemon meringue (still my favourite dessert, although my last effort produced a pathetic meringue) sometime.

I want something that will last for a while so that our bounty stretches into the non-bearing months. Lemons do last well, though. The best place to store them is on the tree, and a lot of people seem to use only fallen fruit for as long as possible, which makes sense. They’ll be fine in the vegetable drawer in your fridge for a few weeks.

Get pickled

It’s quantity I’m after right now, so I decide to pickle them. Mostly, I follow this recipe, and, in my usual manner, I use it as a guideline. This is what I do:

• Wash and scrub about 20 lemons and cut them into wedges.
• Mix about half a cup of coarse salt, two large tablespoons of sugar, around a teaspoon each of various spices (I use cumin seeds, coriander seeds, cloves, ground ginger, cinnamon and chilli powder), and lots of black pepper.
• Layer the lemon and spicy salt mixture in sterilised jars.
• Top each jar with two pretty red chillis.
• Squeeze enough juice from even more lemons to cover the entire lot (that’s a lot of juice and a lot of lemons ... phew).

Now it needs to be left to ferment for three to six weeks. I’ll let you know if the result is worthwhile.

My lemon pickle in the making. Results unknown

Next, when more fruit falls, I am going to squeeze as much juice as possible (or more accurately, get my family to squeeze it), freeze it in ice trays, and then store the cubes in containers in the freezer. That should keep us going until the next lemon season. Sweet.

When the wind blows

When life deals you lemons, the saying goes, make lemonade. In the Eastern Cape, we have our own version: when it’s windy, fly a kite. And watch the march of the sand dunes. As for the lemons … well, eat them.

V and I head for a weekend break with friends at Mtati, about an hour’s drive from East London. It’s just over the Mgwalana River on the road to Port Elizabeth. We’re looking forward to spending time with dear friends, and even though we live at the sea, I’m keen to explore a part of the coast that I don’t know.

C makes the most of the wind with his stunt kite

Mtati is a gated settlement, where about a dozen houses nestle in the coastal forest. All are built of similar basic materials (face brick and wood). With care and low-pitched roofs, none jar on the laid-back feel of the area or intrude on each other. It’s a pleasant change from the sadly common practice of monstrous “homes” being put up without consideration for aesthetics or regulations, let alone neighbours.

So you can have money and taste. And all is well and good.

Howling south-westerly

But the south-westerly howls, sometimes up to 50km/hour, the entire weekend, and the temperature doesn’t edge above 18C.

No problem. M and C haul out their stunt kites and we walk through the milkwoods to the wide sandy beach, typical for this part of the coast. The kites pull and stretch every part of our bodies. Eventually, the fun ends when M’s kite smashes into the sand with enough force to shatter a graphite rod.

I resolve to scratch our kites out of the garage when I get home. We have two, one called a Skydancer (it sounds like a big mosquito) and another called a Phantom (it’s silent). We bought them when we lived in Durban, but put them away in Gauteng, where there was never enough wind to fly them. We’ve forgotten them in our decade back at the coast.

Shifting sands

Sand dunes on the march

We retreat to the house we’ve rented, and M and I suddenly notice something very strange indeed: the beach has shifted. Really. The sand dunes are bigger, and they have marched towards us. We can see the sand washing over the crests of the dunes and we swear that we can see them moving, like waves. In fact, sand dunes do move, and it’s windy enough here for us to actually see them doing so.

Clearly, I am an eastern Eastern Cape creature because I have never witnessed this. On the beaches of the Transkei, my childhood home, the sand dunes were excellent “ski slopes”: we’d scream down them on bits of cardboard. But we could never see the dunes moving. And the sand there is much coarser, as it is on the beaches around my village.

Feast, feast and more feast

My favourite kind of lunch

The chill factor escalates in the relentless wind. But our friends make it warm inside. So does the food. We punctuate non-stop conversations with feast after feast fit for royalty.

V poaches free-range eggs in a spicy tomato gravy for breakfast (I am the assistant). C and M serve up the kind of lunch I like the most: a smorgasbord of things like cheeses, stuffed jalapenos, marinated artichokes, olives and crusty bread rolls.

And while A braais (barbeques meat, which South Africans do come rain or wind) for supper, L cooks beetroot in berry juice, and then blends it with pecan nuts that she has boiled, lightly sugared and fried to recrisp. It’s a taste sensation (doesn’t turn my plate red, either). L, incidentally, eats sliced lemons with salt, just like that.

On Sunday, we lunch at the nearby Mpekweni Beach Resort. It’s pretty here behind big windows that look onto the sea. But it’s not a sensible place for vegetarians: like most of these kinds of establishments, there are countless magnificent meat dishes and even the salads are stuffed with flesh.

If a vegetarian wanted a “normal” meal, well, you’d be stuck with overcooked pasta in a white sauce. I give it a miss. Instead, I quaff two glasses of wine, descend on the cheeses and have several helpings of (magnificent) desserts. It’s a fine enough Sunday lunch. I’m not here for the food, anyway. I’m here for the company.

Beauty behind the beasty thorns

Collecting plants was never intentional, but I guess it’s the kind of gardener I turned out to be. In fact, the collecting itch is as old as my first stirrings of any interest in gardening. That was in Durban, when my children were babies, in the very first home that we owned.

Cacti and other succulents on the sunny plinth

Our patch was a steep plot in Westville, where I tried to fashion a little garden on the least precarious part. I nurtured the tropical plants that thrive in that hot and humid city, with varying degrees of success and failure.

Seduction

And I discovered bromeliads: I was seduced by their almost obscene flowers, often in vibrant red, that stand up out of their pineapple-like rosettes. So an ever-growing corner of my tiny garden was devoted to bromeliads, all kinds of them. Rainforest plants from the Americas, they love the Durban climate. You’ll still find bromeliads in my garden, in those parts where non-invasive, non-indigenous plants grow.

Over the years, there have been brief flirtations with African violets and fussy ferns (“combed” to death by my children), a slightly more intense affair with dracaenas (thank goodness I planted most in pots and not in the ground, where they get enormous), and enduring relationships with trees (space-permitting), roses and fuschias. Why plant one variety of lettuce when there are a whole lot to try? Why just one type of tomato?

Closer view of the mosaic: note how it sneaks up from the floor

But nothing set in as strongly as my fascination with cacti and other succulents. I didn’t even know it was happening. One day, I looked around and thought: “Ooh, there are so many succulents in little pots all over the place. What would happen if I put them all together?” An instant and abiding collection is what happened.

Cunning mosaic

Flowers of the devil's tongue barrel cactus

I learned the first rule about collections: things look better in groups. I saved the plinth of an old broken water tank from the builders in the nick of time – “Stop!” I shrieked after telling them to smash it down – and set about covering it in a mosaic (of flowers, of course). The mosaic, if you look carefully, cunningly extends from the floor mosaic that covers the ugly mix of old and new concrete.

The plinth is crammed with all kinds of cacti, most of which come from Central America. One of my favourites is a devil’s tongue barrel (Ferocactus latispinus). It was given to me – it measured about 10cm across then – as part of an invitation to an event when I worked on a newspaper in Johannesburg. We had to hand in gifts to avoid being bribed; they would be auctioned to the staff at the end of each year and the proceeds given to charity. I couldn’t banish this little thing to a cupboard and certain death, so I “declared” the gift and took it home.

One of the crassulas

Monstrous

It’s grown into a monstrous thing, about 60cm wide with vicious hook-like claws: I bear a scar as proof. But when it flowers, you’d swear the fairies had dropped some delicacy – fragile yellow flowers hide behind the thorns. That, to me, is the magic of cacti: the beasty thorns contrast with flowers of surprising and exceptional beauty.

Faucaria in flower

I love the South African succulents in my collection, like the gasteria (so named because the flowers look like little stomachs), hawthornia, little aloes and faucaria. Some of these prefer shade, so the collection extends onto an old scaffolding plank in the shade.

Pretty vicious

The euphorbia could probably make a collection in their own right: those in my care range from the giant African candelabra (kept small in pots) to the wiggly Euphorbia caput-medusa (I just love that name; the plant does look like Medusa’s head).

Periodically, I cut up old ice-cream containers to make labels and try to identify the plants in the collection. Just when I think I have found the correct name, something else that seems more correct presents itself, as if the name is forever wriggling out of reach. Doesn’t matter; I like the search.

Bubbling from the pot

I’m sitting here, quietly watching the sea, when the peace is shattered by raucous laughter – my own, that is. I am giggling with my cousin, Vick, who happens to be in London.

Kif! In other words, those are pretty nice shells

We chat all the time, you see, thanks to smartphones, facebook and email. She’s just told me that she thought she was being “very international” by using the word “fundi” until it dawned on her that no-one understood what she was saying. When a South African says “fundi”, they mean “expert”. To most others, it is gobbledygook.

Strange variety

What makes it even funnier is that Vick has been in a very senior position on a very large UK newspaper, but speaks a rather strange variety of the English language: the South African kind.

I, too, did not know that “fundi” was a South African word, and I raise it with my sister K (she lives in Geneva, remember, where she has a top job in a big multinational). “Oops, I use it all the time,” she says.

A bit of research reveals that “fundi” actually comes from the Nguni (Xhosa and Zulu) word for teacher: umfindisi. It also has some other fairly obscure meanings: we could, for example, be referring to a fundamentalist greenie in Germany (but we’re not).

So we chuckle at ourselves. The truth is that South Africans rejoice in this rich English that has bubbled out of our post-apartheid melting pot.

Peppered chats

We liberally pepper our chats with words that we know are South African, like “eish” (I’m shocked/annoyed/amazed), “eina” (ouch), “kif” (nice/pretty), “muti” (medicine), “lekker” (nice) and, even, when we’re very cross, “bliksem” (a naughty person, or to hit something). Those words – there are a lot of them (try here for a taste) – are Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu or any one of South Africa’s 11 official languages.

We also have another whole decidedly South African lexicon of English that we use all the time – and usually, we don’t know there is anything odd about it. That applies to even the most sophisticated, globally speaking, of us: people like Vick and K.

K, for example, adds that she’s just told an American friend that she would “hold thumbs” for his wife, who’s just been for a job interview. “He asked how one held thumbs. When I explained, he said, ‘Oh you mean, like crossing fingers’.”

When she visited a few weeks ago, we shrieked with laughter as she related how she was greeted with blank stares when she declared that she would “fetch” her daughter. You fetch a thing (a dog fetches his bone?), not a person. Then she kept us in hysterics as she ran through a string of phrases that she has discovered are thoroughly South African. So we will say that something is “not a train smash” (not so bad). We will declare, “serious” (pronounce “see-ree-ous”, with lots of exclamations marks), when we really want to make a point. Or we will say “ag, shame” when something is cute.

Newsroom run-ins

And when Vick visited, we literally rolled on the floor with laughter as she described her London newsroom run-ins with our peculiar language. She had problems, she said, with “just now”, which South Africans interpret as “in a little while”. I am quoting her from memory, but she says it’s close enough.

“When British people say it, they mean, ‘immediately’. So at first, a lot of the subs thought I was being very pushy because I kept asking them if they would complete tasks and stories ‘just now’. Eventually we adapted it and they would ask me, Do you mean an English ‘just now’ or a South African ‘just now’?”

Robots

To South Africans and no-one else, a “robot” is a “traffic light”. As Vick discovered: “I once asked the picture editor to put across an image of a robot – I needed to use it as a cut-out. I waited and waited ... We were getting dangerously close to deadline, so I strode across to urge the picture desk into action. She opened up a folder full of pictures she’d put across in response to my request ... It was crammed with computer robots from science fiction movies!

“And then there was the day when I complimented one of my colleagues on her new jeans. I said, ‘Ooh, I like your pants!’ She looked horrified, blushed, and then asked me whether her trousers were see-through. It’s ‘trousers’ over here; ‘pants’ are knickers.” 

On that note, I am going to water the vegetable garden before the sun goes down.

Birdie business

Sunbird weaving her pretty nest

We are drinking tea, Kathy and I, at her lounge window. Right outside the window, a sunbird is busily weaving her nest. She is using bits of stringy vegetation (apparently, they also use some spider webs) and shreds of fabric that Kathy has purposely left out. So it’s quite a pretty, arty affair. 

It is probably a malachite sunbird; these tiny birds are quite prolific around here. This little brown thing is a female; the males are the brightly coloured ones. There has been a flurry of bright green wings at my bedroom window: that’s a male.

Rollercoaster

Red-collared barbets perch outside my bedroom window

Kathy seems to have a particular pull for birds. For a while, a red-collared barbet moved in with her and Phil. They called him Rollercoaster because of the way he flew at them and over them. He became a beloved pet. They would even get baby-sitters (bird-sitters?) for him when they went away. He would love to sit on visitors’ heads and nibble on their ears.

And then, one day, probably when he was in his adolescence, Rollercoaster upped and flew away. He settled with a couple on the other side of the village for a week or two, and then moved on. K and P were very sad, but understood it as the way of things.

We watch the sunbird in wonder, and then we go back to drinking our tea. Birds, you see, are as natural as breathing here.

Bashing, smashing

A family of hornbills lives noisily in the forest around my garden, and we didn’t bat an eyelid when one of them kept bashing his large beak against the kitchen window. I thought he was reacting to his own reflection until someone kindly pointed out that he was in fact smashing his prey to death. That would explain the strange smears on the glass.

More of a mystery right now is the very large bird of prey that periodically perches on the telephone pole behind the house. We think it’s an eagle, but have no idea what type. I managed to take a photograph: it’s blurred, but you can just make out some colouring.

Regulars

There’s a host of regulars: the barbets that like to sit on the branch outside my bedroom; the mousebirds that scoff their way through the fruit trees; the little wagtails that dance across the grass. Among my favourites, though, are the kingfishers, both pygmy and malachite. They especially like to sit on the wooden fence around the vegetable garden, or, to give me a lovely respite from hard thinking, outside my office window.

Eagle on the pole

Hornbill on the verandah

Kingfisher at my office window

Autumn in the global village

Today, we all live in the “global village” that Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan first spoke about in the ’60s. That’s why people like me can work from remote places like this for people anywhere.

Arum adds dashing white to the autumn party

In this world made small by technology, quite a lot of my paid work comes from Europe and some from the US. I love the global perspective that I get through this work. But I am still thrown by the insistence of so many writers in those Northern Hemisphere countries – when they are writing for global audiences – on talking about “spring”, “autumn”, or even “fall”. They will usually be talking about a meeting or a decision, very often concerning low-income countries, most of which are in the Southern Hemisphere – and nothing remotely related to the seasons. 

Delicious wild plum, savoured by all

Strange, hey? At first, I saw it as some kind of arrogance (even the seasons were more legitimate in the North, it seemed). Now I see it as a habit, one that could be quite endearing if wasn’t so confusing for readers in the South. So at this time of the year, I’ve seen quite a few uses of “spring” pop up in documents.

Spring time

Crown of thorns, simply beautiful

Clivia nobilis, an early flower

After winter in the North, I’m happy that it’s spring there. But it is most definitely autumn here in the South, and believe me, after our summer, we’ve happy that it’s autumn.

My cousin, Vick, sends me pictures of the stunning “Lady Night” tulips blooming in her London garden. And my sister, K, reminds me of the tulips and daffodils that grow like weeds in her Geneva garden. In spring that is. Both of them have also sent me pictures of their snow-covered winter gardens. 

And then I look around and take conscious note of what is flowering and fruiting in this frost-free, summer-rainfall area as winter approaches. 

There’s not much leaf fall here. It’s too warm for that, and the oranges and reds of deciduous trees never fail to delight me when I am visiting colder places in autumn. But there is a lot of orange here right now. It comes from the things that are flowering: among them, bird of paradise (Strelitzia reginae), gazania, and wild dagga (Leonotis leonurus).

A party of colour

Barberton daisy, still shining

Not all is orange. The Euphorbia crown of thorns (E. milii) is a riot of red. The ribbon bush (Hypoestes aristata) is in full purple haze. What we believe is a streptocarpus from Pondoland is sneaking out dainty blue blooms. The arum lily (Zantedeschia aethiopica), wild daisy (Osteospermum), and camellia join the party with dashes of pure white.

The clivia nobilis are beginning to flower: the clivia miniata will follow in winter and spring. The Barberton daisy (Gerbera jamesonii) continues to throw out gorgeous flowers, mostly in orange, which are fabulous in a vase. On the good advice of the woman at the farmers’ market, use only the tiniest amount of water, just enough to cover the tips of the stems; otherwise, they rot.

 

Dripping

The amantungula (wild plum, Carissa macrocarpa), which followed fragant white flowers, are dripping off the trees. All kinds of wildlife love these, and even humans are fond of them, but the fruit has to be very ripe: just a trace of milkiness makes them bitter.

Ribbon bush, a purple haze

We grow both indigenous and non-invasive exotic plants in the newer beds that hug the old naartjie (heavy with fruit now) and cherry guava (just finished fruiting) trees. These beds are behind the house, and far from the indigenous forest that lines the garden.

The roses are putting on a beautiful autumn show in this part of the garden. We never use poisons on these roses; splashes of “worm wee” now and then, and sprays of garlic and chilli, when needed, seem to help. So we have lost a few, but those that remain are survivors in an area that’s not really known for roses: they are more successful, usually, in places that get frost.

Roll on, summer … uh, winter.