Today smiles on us

After weeks of foul weather, today smiles on us with sunshine and a cooling breath of wind. That breath is becoming a hot berg wind, though, and the heat is surely a warning that more foul weather is on its way. Nevertheless … the day feels like summer and it reminds me how enormously privileged I am to live here next to the sea.

Treasures from the beach

So by 9am, I have downed tools – work can wait until later – and I’m on the beach, coated in sunscreen, with not another human in sight. The only fellow beach creatures (well, those that I can see anyway) are birds. It is, after all, a Wednesday morning.

I even have a quick dip, although the water is still on the chilly side. Mostly, though, I forage for things like shells, polished sea glass (did you know that the sea glass got that way because it’s been nurtured by the sea and sand for 20 to 30 years?), gnarled driftwood, and smooth rounded stones.

Some of the treasures get carted home, where they sit around the garden looking pretty. Sometimes, shells may have a practical purpose, like edging for a bed or pathway. Broken shells make fabulous mulch, especially in pots.

Some treasures find their way into mobiles

Some treasures and beach-found things become part of a mosaic or a mobile. I’ve just made a big mobile that hangs over a workspace in my office. It’s great inspiration for me when I’m doing something serious. 

Some find their way into mosaics

The flooded rivers – all this rain – brought down heaps of driftwood that has washed onto the beach, and a few pieces have found new life woven into my fence.

Recently, I paid a man called Lub to dig out a stretch of grass for a new bed. He turned out to be so handy that he built a gate – from driftwood – for an awkward spot. I’m thinking of adorning it with a few strings of shells …

My fellow beach creatures today

An ode to singing souls

Whether it’s a passing touch of the blues or sheer horror that can persist for years, bad times happen to all of us. When I’ve been able to stand back and look at my own bad times with some sort of detachment, I’ve been intrigued trying to understand why some of us lift out of the sadness, sometimes with new momentum, and some seem almost trapped in bleakness.

The most joyful colour of all ... yellow flowers, like this hibiscus in my garden, are R’s favourite

There are plenty of theories, some to do with being a pessimist or an optimist. Also, I’m not suggesting for a second that depression is not a real disease that needs medical treatment.

In a relaxed conversation with my aunt, R, she gifted me (well, that’s how it felt) with a sudden sharp clarity that was so obvious and so crazy that it made complete sense.

“I think I have a singing soul,” she said. This is always how it has been for her, she said: she’d always had this deep joy about life. And I felt something smile deep inside me, inside my soul maybe.

Only twice had she not felt her soul sing. The first time was when she went to university for the first time and was desperately homesick: my aunt went to medical school in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Can you imagine how hard that must have been for the young woman at that time? Not only was she heading off on her own to another city, she was also venturing into what was decidedly a man’s profession.

Evergreen

The second time was when her husband of almost 50 years died; that was just over a year ago. Theirs was a fairy-tale marriage. They married soon after meeting each other – they just knew. Every week of their life together, he gave her flowers, usually yellow, her favourite. And as he became more and more ill, he told her that now, in the winter of his life, she was his evergreen.

She went into a very dark place after his death, and even though she would smile at you, as she had always done, there was a sense of great fragility and great despair. This is not something that you “get over”.

I know from the death of my own father in his 50s, very young, that you never get over the loss of someone you love. But eventually, you are able to think about him, and even genuinely smile about him, without feeling that you have been gutted.

R had lost her life partner, a wonderful man who was literally the centre of her life; their three grown daughters also proudly declare that they are always “Daddy’s girls”. I was just one person who began fearing that R would not be able to live with her loss.

Bubbling

And here she was, telling me that she could feel her soul sing again, bubbling up inside her. It brought tears to my eyes and it made me feel immensely happy. I realised that I too have this thing, this singing soul: even when there is immense sadness, the joy will come back. In this clarity, I knew that I had recognised it in my cousins. 

So I tell Vick about it. She responds: “Thank you for telling me this … It is beautiful and brings tears to my eyes too. What a wonderful notion. Grandma (our Mary) definitely had it too. Aren’t we superbly lucky to have come from these exquisite souls? I shall keep this to read forever as it tops up my soul.”

And that’s why I am sharing it with you. If you listen, chances are you’ll hear your soul sing too. I hope you do.

The power of getting lost

My goal these days is to work (as in do paying work) for half the month and do life things, like garden and be with my people, for the other half. The thing is, I’m no longer immersed in weeks-long, even months-long, stints of working like a fiend. So after a few days of hard work, I really need to clear my head.

An antidote to sadness ... my recycled linen cupboard

When I get let myself go in the garden, before I know it, I’m doing a kind of meditation – I stop thinking. It’s a direct opposite to where I am when I am working – all in my head. And when I have a touch of sadness, I also find gardening to be a great mood lifter, a great healer.

That creative place

But there’s something else that I lean on when I need to still my mind or deal with one of life’s stresses, and that’s working with my hands, preferably in a way that dips into that place of creativity in me. We all have that place – and you don’t have to be an “artist” to be creative.

I find it easy to lose myself in making a mosaic, for example, or fashioning a dream catcher out of swirls of wood and beach pickings. They’re not masterpieces, but they are mine, they come from me, and that’s enough.

A complicated patchwork loose cover

Close-up details

In one particularly stressful time of my life, I threw myself into making a loose cover for a big sofa. I’d never made such a thing before, and, of course, I didn’t choose the simple route. Instead of using regular fabric, I made a patchwork and then made the cover out of that. It became very complicated indeed. Maybe that’s what I needed to do at that time.

Flick-flacks 

I’m quite pleased with the outcome of one of my most recent forays into creativity. We needed somewhere to store our linen, and when Cindy tossed out an old TV cabinet, my mind started doing flick-flacks. No wonder she was throwing it out. It was quite ugly: dark imbuia wood, it was a heavy, oppressive piece. But I liked its lines and the little ball-and-claw feet. Plus, it was solid and strong.

I sanded the cabinet, coated it in wood primer, and then painted it in a deep charcoal blue called “Everest Blue” (by Plascon). I scratched out a tin of silver paint, and used that for the top, the beading and the feet. I used the principles of decoupage to cover the doors: instead of paper, though, I cut out shapes from fabrics, chosen largely for their colours. And then I replaced the old wooden knobs with shiny glass balls. Pretty.

V added an extra shelf for storage, and now the recycled unit stands proudly at the front door. People don’t need to know that it is storing linen. It’s just something that is rather pleasing to the eye. And a bit of therapy too.

Goodbye, Max

My heart is heavy because this morning, we took our beloved dog, Max, to the vet to be put to sleep. He was 14, a good innings for a large dog. He was sore a lot of the time: his skin itched constantly and he suffered with hip dysplasia. And he was uncomfortable: his arthritis was making it more and more difficult to move.

Max, the one and only

But he lived to go to the beach. There, he would forget his age and his pains, and he would frolic like a puppy. He would wait at the front door, just in case someone tried to slip off without him. After a life in suburbia, Max spent his last 18 months in his own paradise.

The morning was good to Max; the beautiful calm weather meant that he could have that last jaunt to the beach. But then he battled to walk up the little bank from the beach.

He was calm when he went, and I like to think that he welcomed the relief. Maybe even, he’s now with the great love of his life, Gypsy, our Irish terrier who died of biliary fever a few years before we moved to this village. But that doesn’t make it any less sad.

So then I discover something else about gardening: it helps healing. I start planting: turnips in the vegetable garden and giant stocks in the non-indigenous section. I foliar feed absolutely everything with earthworm “wee”. I pull out weeds. And I think of Max all this time, his gentle presence: after the beach, the garden was his favourite place to be. Somehow I feel a little lighter when I’m done.

Power to you

When my children were very little people, they asked me if I’d been “alive when the dinosaurs were alive”. When I stopped laughing long enough to answer them, they declared with certainty that it was their granny, my mother, who’d been alive with the dinosaurs.

The view from my desk

So even if I’m not that old, I do remember counting characters in headlines manually so that they would not “bust” out of the spaces allocated to them on paper layout grids. A capital “M”, for example, would make up two characters, and a lower-case “i” would be half a character.

You would have to “size” photographs meticulously. And if a story needed radical editing, you would literally cut it up with scissors and then paste it, sometimes line by line, into something readable. This would all get sent to the Works department. Inevitably, one of the sub-editors would follow the bits of paper to hack out paragraphs or rewrite a headline “on the stone”.

Revolutions

Then came the first of the revolutions that I and my generation experienced in newspapers: the introduction of typesetting computers that allowed us to write headlines to fit exactly and cut copy to size in exact column widths. Cutting and pasting features made rewriting a breeze.

Another view from where I work today

The next revolution would have come even sooner if it hadn’t entailed the loss of so many jobs: typesetters and strippers became redundant. It brought the ability to design and lay out entire pages – with pictures, headlines and later even adverts – on a screen in front of you. Things happened much quicker and with a lot more precision.

An adventure

Meanwhile, the growth of the internet and leaps in accessibility and speed made it possible for more adventurous employers to try new ways of doing things. Telework was the buzzword. A string of big companies saw its benefits: for example, British Telecom’s 9,000 teleworkers are reportedly 30% more productive than those who stayed in the office.

Technology has also allowed people like me to work from places like this. This would not have been an option for me 15 years ago. Today, my office looks out onto the sea; incidentally, as I write this, I’m watching at least two whales frolicking. I am about 1,000km from Johannesburg, but am still occasionally invited to a business breakfast in Midrand as if I lived just up the highway, not down a distant dirt track.

Different dinosaurs

My point is that revolutions that fundamentally affect the way we do things – that give us the power to choose how we live and how we work – are taking place in our lifetimes. We have different dinosaurs these days.

Through these great blogging sites, any of us can tell our stories without having to sell them to newspapers. That’s hugely empowering.

It’s also great being a reader in this new world (I confess that I am an utter beginner). On any given day, I may journey with a fascinating array of people on a London tube, have my spirits lifted by young woman’s journey towards her dream in Ireland, be energised by drifting over boundaries in my own city, enjoy this part of my country through the camera of a talented friend, and wait for K’s next post as she articulates how we face up to this era of social media. It works for me.

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.

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.

When freedom is normal

It’s Saturday on Freedom Weekend. My body is tired after this back-breaking work of digging out weeds, grass and other invasive stuff from the aloe garden. So I am happy to pounce on V’s suggestion that we drive to Chintsa East (a huge village on this part of the east coast, relatively speaking) to find a restaurant where we can have lunch.

 

A corner of my (legal) home: plenty of reason to smile

First stop is the Barefoot Café. I love the barstools here – they are made from old paint drums – and the menu is good, even for vegetarians. But it is packed – there is rugby on the TV – and it smells of beer, which is what pubs tend to do. 

We head to Michaelas, perched on the very top of a sand dune. I can’t tell you much about the quality of the food these days, but the views are spectacular. We climb into the see-through lift. It jerks and shudders its way up the sand dune, through the milkwood trees, wild banana (Strelitzia nicolai) and the coastal silver oak (this stuff is all over the place!).

Chop-chop

But Michaelas is about to close its doors for a private function, so we will have to be chop-chop (quick) about ordering food. We don’t fancy a rushed meal, so decide to have a drink on the deck overlooking the sea instead. There are a few other occupied tables, but it suddenly strikes me … “There are no black people here,” I hiss at V.

“What about me?” he says. “You don’t count,” I answer, without really thinking. He laughs because he’s a good sport.

Let me explain. Most South Africans are not racists, but, given our history, we are so very aware of race. And this is, after all, Freedom Weekend. Okay, for the sake of accuracy, it was Freedom Day on Friday, a public holiday to mark our first post-apartheid elections in 1994. With the help of Workers’ Day tomorrow, we are making a long weekend of it all.

Isis, another normality

As we should: it’s been 18 years since those first elections when we queued and queued to vote (with something like a 90% poll). We did it in our millions, we did it proudly, and despite four decades of the most appalling racism that structured everything in our lives, we did it peacefully. We should never stop celebrating.

Us, the criminals

V and I have our own little celebrating to do on this Freedom Weekend. He is of Indian descent and I am of European descent: for the first few years after we met, we were actually criminals because our relationship was illegal.

The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and Section 16 of the Immorality Act were repealed in 1985. We married in 1986 and it did involve some sort of racial reclassification for me; I’m still not sure what race the morons made me. We do laugh about that now, but it wasn’t funny at the time.

Trying to go to some establishment for dinner or drinks was usually very difficult indeed. He would either not be allowed in or I would be harassed. So it’s kind of nice being able to drift to whichever place we feel like.

Anyway, back to the drinks with a view. On cue, it seems, a black man and two black women wander on to the deck. They take some photographs. They seem in a hurry to leave, but I hear one of the women say: “I like this place.”

So do we. We stay for a second drink. And we consider trying to get something to eat at Country Bumpkin or Murambi Country Kitchen.

A legal home

But we prefer to go home: we live in our home legally, and that means a lot because we remember the Group Areas Act that made it so hard for us to find somewhere to live, a home. That legislation reserved the most prime property for whites. It was repealed, along with the Population Registration Act, only in 1991.

We had to sneak around and hide away, breaking the law, of course. And we came across some nasty little “lefties”, spoilt white brats, who actually made profits out of sub-letting apartments in “white” areas to illegals.

That’s another story. I’ll share it with you sometime. In the meantime, let’s just savour freedom.

“I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.” – Nelson Mandela

The art of wasting time

In my former life, I had a “proper” job and tried my best to be a decent mother (mothers are always full-time, no matter what else they are doing). I was far too busy to waste time on things like being a member of a book club. Now, I am a member of not just one, but two, book clubs, and I treasure the time I waste with the clever, interesting women who gather to drink wine, laugh, cry, discuss books, and make sense of our lives.

When the royalty, Isis and Angel, allow, I waste time learning to drum

I’ve just started wasting time learning to play the djembe drum and, until quite recently, I wasted oodles of time going to pottery classes.

In fact, I’ve become a master at time wasting. It is a real art. I can spend ages staring at the sea, for example, watching the swell and assessing the crazy array of blues and greys. And I can beachcomb for hours.

Just this morning, I watched a very large pod of dolphins (maybe more than one) swim past while a flock of gannets dived madly into the sea. Perhaps it’s an early sign of the sardine run that is still to come. It was a frenzy, but not at all hurried. I know because I watched it all.

Enriched

And I don’t feel guilty, not any more. Instead, I feel enriched, deep down inside.

You see, in my former life, I ran around doing urgent things, so much that I seldom had time to do the important things. Today, I do the important things – like be with my friends and my family, be fully aware of this amazing environment, and take care of my own needs.

Crises and urgent things still crop up, of course, but they are part of the picture, not the whole picture. And my work – which I do enjoy very much, by the way – has become part of my life, not my whole life.

Cracking the work ethic

Beachcombing yields all kinds of delights

But it was very hard work to crack that Calvinistic work ethic: the ingrained notion that work is somehow good for the soul. I’m not for a minute suggesting that we shouldn’t work – that would be silly – but, rather, that we try to find a way that works for each of us to put work where it belongs, as part of life. 

So when I left Gauteng 11 years ago to get a life here in the Eastern Cape, I worked very hard indeed as a freelancer, and congratulated myself on those months that I earned more than I had in the employment I had left. It didn’t take long for the burn-out and dissatisfaction to creep back. And I wondered why I had given up the career if I was trying so hard to maintain the status quo.

A new way of being

I began to understand that my job had been a primary part of my identity for a long time, and that I would have to learn a new way of being in the world. I went from the hectic extreme to the idle other side (didn’t like that at all) until, eventually, I did find a balance and things began to fall into place. It was when I could “waste time” without an ounce of guilt that I knew I was well on my way. 

My life is nowhere near as busy as it once was, but it is fuller than ever before. It remains a learning process; perhaps it always will. I like it that way.

PS: V has pointed me to this article, written by a former car worker, Walter Johnson. Published 26 years ago, it’s as timely as ever. It goes to the root of that irrational idea that the harder you work, the more likely your salvation, that work is “the measure of a person’s moral worth and character”. Then he examines how and why the ethic that drives the work-consumption-debt cycle is sustained. It’s really worth a read.

Familiar comfort

Coastal red milkwood fruit on the table

The milkwood tree has been a constant in my life for as long as I remember. The trees grow prolifically in the coastal dune forests of the Wild Coast in the former Transkei “bantustan”, where I grew up. As we discovered as children, the gnarled branches make excellent resting spots in the shade for tired, salt- and sand-encrusted bodies. And those springy ones that twist close to the ground as they try to grow towards the light … well, the joys for small children are endless.

After I left the Transkei to study and work elsewhere, I would return every year to this piece of paradise. The milkwoods would be there, like sentries of a time when there were no cares. In Durban, I felt a comforting flutter of familiarity when I saw these same trees – albeit much smaller and seldom in a clump – on the city beachfront.

Protection

Now, a little further south from my childhood home, they shelter my outdoor gathering space, stretching their limbs overhead and lining the forest that my garden touches. I like to think that they are protecting this space. Hence, I did not sniff in derision when I read that the milkwood tree is associated with some powerful stuff: its energy is thought to bring a deep sense of connection and belonging and to help us “with feeling at home in the world” (more on this here).

Morning sun warms the milkwood

These trees, and those that I knew so well in the Transkei and chanced on in Durban, are the coastal red milkwood (Mimusops caffra). The South African National Biodiversity Institute tells us that it is found naturally in dune forest in KwaZulu-Natal and the Transkei, and is common from Port Alfred and Bathurst (small towns about 150km to the south of East London) and all the way to Mozambique. It’s a protected tree in South Africa, which means that it may not be cut, disturbed, damaged or destroyed.

Those in my garden are sporting fat red fruit right now: the birds love them, and the monkeys gorge on them. The berries prettily decorate the table. They seed themselves freely, and it’s always a thrill seeing a baby milkwood sprouting from the black, sandy soil.

Good company

Two other Mimusops are indigenous to South Africa: the bush red milkwood (M. obovata), which is bigger, and the Transvaal red milkwood (M. zeyheri), which has yellow fruit.

Then there is the white milkwood, also indigenous to South Africa, but that’s a different genus entirely (Sideroxylon inerme). As a child, I remember being intrigued when we stopped in Mossel Bay on a long road trip to Cape Town to have a look at the “post-office tree”, which functioned as a post office for European colonists in the 1500s: people would tuck letters into the tree. This enormous, sprawling tree is a white milkwood.

A different matter entirely is Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s 1954 radio drama, Under Milk Wood, later made into a stage play and a movie. It’s set in a make-believe village called Llareggub (try it backwards), and it’s about the dreams and lives of the people who live there. No resemblance intended, I promise, not even on this April Fool's Day!

Here and now

Once, not that long ago, I clawed and sweated my way along the corporate ladder. This was the done thing, so it seemed, and I worked hard to meet the goals that my society taught me were good. When I was not too exhausted, I thought that I was indeed a successful someone. And then I walked away, moving from the bigness and busyness of Johannesburg to the quiet of the small coastal city of East London on the south-eastern coast.

At the time, I put it down to the hole that corporate life and its values had bored into my soul. I see now that it had more to do with sheer burnout and, mostly, to the realisation that it was more important to me to spend time with my children, my partner and my friends than to chase the next story, the next way to make some money, the next rung on the ladder. It was not about losing my ambitiousness: it was about being more honest to me about what I wanted to achieve. In short, it was about getting a life. Was it sensible to abandon the salary and security that came with the big job and the big career? Probably not. But 10 years later, I do know that the hole in my soul has taken care of itself. Perhaps there is a different way to be sensible.

Watching from the milkwood tree

So my series of choices has brought me here – to this place under the milkwood tree – at this time. I remain as ambitious as ever: at any random moment, my ambition may be to grow the perfect organic brinjal; at any other moment, it may be to find exactly the right words for a piece of writing, my own or someone else’s.

But, first, before we go there, let me tell you about here. This part of my garden is its heart. It edges onto the coastal forest and I share it with all kinds of creatures, not just human. As I sit here at the big teak table, a thrush is busily darting about. Earlier, from my bedroom window up there, I watched a pair of orioles high in the branches of the milkwood. I can hear the troupe of very naughty monkeys scuttling in the forest, quite close. An entire nursery of guinea fowls is scratching through the aloe garden, which I can just see from here. And Isis the cat is trying to crawl onto my keyboard. On weekends, the human kind of creatures gather around the table. Perhaps we make a fire – a braai (barbeque). Probably, we eat some of V’s freshly baked ciabatta and drink some wine. And definitely, we begin again to solve the world’s problems.

There is not just one lonely milkwood tree stretching its branches over my head. There are, in fact, two milkwoods (Mimusops caffra) and an allophylus: my friend, Kathy, cracks into a smile every time I remind her of the allophylus’s name. Overhead, I can’t make out where one tree ends and the other starts. Baubles from Christmas Day – we had lunch here, of course – still hang from the branches. We left them there because they look so pretty. A useful spinoff is that porcupines apparently don’t like the shininess of the baubles. Perhaps this is true: since we added the baubles to the bits of mirror mosaic and little solar lights, the porcupines have stopped digging up the agapanthus and the paintbrush (haemanthus) and sand lily (veltheimia) bulbs.

The larger milkwood is a handsome fellow indeed. He is big and strong, even more so since we hacked away the bougainvillea that had slithered all the way to the top, happily smothering the poor thing. The trunk of the smaller milkwood has, intriguingly, shot at a 45 degree angle from the ground. The trunk now bears a “face”; to V’s horror, I gave him this face as a gift, along with some LED solar lights in the shape of butterflies and dragonflies. Well, I thought they were gorgeous. 

Beyond this milkwood is a knobwood tree (Zanthoxylum davyi). If you crush its leaves, it offers a delight: the scent of lemon. Today, freed of a thick choking vine, this little fighter stands upright, reaching proudly for the sky. Soon, it will rival the milkwood in height.

This part of the garden blends into “the bush” (this is how South Africans describe all kinds of groupings of native vegetation), so today, almost all the things growing here are indigenous. There are pools of sun and pools of shade. Closer to my level is an array of treasures, among them, a few types of plectranthus, red hot pokers (kniphofia, including a yellow variety), blue felicia, wild iris (dietes), wild garlic (tulbaghia; the story goes that it repels snakes), bulbinella (the gel is brilliant for soothing cuts and scrapes), a pavetta (forest bride’s bush, which I grew from a cutting; it should reach a couple of metres in time), little creeping aloes, plumbago, and thatching grass. The previous owner brought the crinums, which grow in this part of the Eastern Cape, from a nearby farm; I have divided the bulbs and spread them around, and the big spiky white flowers in mid-summer are truly majestic.

Guinea fowls in the aloe garden

The slope towards the sea is covered in clivias (mostly miniata, but also some of the lovely nobilis variety). This is one of the most beautiful plants you could ever wish for: its shiny strap-like leaves are always attractive, and its flowers are mostly of the craziest, almost neon orange. The flowers brighten the late winter days, and are followed by bunches of seeds, which slowly morph into fat red troves of new plants. Some of these clivias were decimated by amaryllis worms – sorry, I can’t see any beauty in the black and yellow stripes that coat their thick bodies – but I think I have found a way to control them. I make a “tea” out of chopped chilli, crushed garlic and shavings of green household soap, and pour the diluted liquid into the heart of the plant. Strained, a spray of this mixture helps to keep bad goggas (insects) off roses and vegetables: you have to use caution because it probably gets rid of some good goggas too.

From this heart, the garden fans out around the house, past the outdoor shower, past the fire pit, past the big, big clump of strelitzia. If you bear with me, I’ll take you to every corner of my garden, sometimes my life, and share with you what I have learnt and have yet to learn.

Note: I will do my best to provide the proper names of plants, but I ask forgiveness in advance for errors!