Kids’ prize-givings: I’d never missed a single one

The thing, when there are two parents, is that there is always someone on standby – to fetch and carry, to be present and correct, to ameliorate emotional matters.

So being one parent – with all its many, many pros – has that one con: that it’s only you. If you can’t do it, no-one will.

(Actually, not entirely, as I discovered when I was immobilised for many months, and my friends fetched and carried.)

But of all the things I missed when I was missing from the normal round of things, this one I missed the most (and I can hardly believe, given how much I’ve whinged about it in the past, that I’m saying this, but I am): at my daughter’s prize-giving at the end of this scholastic year, she won three prizes, a certificate for Maths and two cash prizes for English – and she wasn’t there to receive them, and I wasn’t there to see her get them. A nasteh first.

My children’s father long ago lost interest in their day-to-day triumphs and failures, so it has always been literally doubly important for me to be there for them. So, for instance, it was really vital for me to be there when my daughter was made a prefect in grade 7, and she and I were only the only English people up on the stage accepting this honour AND she was the only one with a single parent there to represent her (all the other kids – Afrikaans to a man(boy/girl) had proud mom&dads standing behind them), and I thought Well, at least I’m here. Hey, I may have been an English woman, and indubitably I was dressed inappropriately (because, and I’m not making this up, I always am), but by god I was there.

This might explain why, when I saw the animated Disney movie Up, and the little boy Russel gets his badge at the end, and there’s someone there to stand up for him, I cried so hard I leaked mucus all over my duvet. So please be patient with me for posting this pic of my kids, embarrassed practically out of their heads, when I insisted on snapping them and their certificates after a prize-giving a few years ago. Aw.

Anyway, I missed my daughter’s prize-giving this year, for the first time, and I just want to put on the record that it is the only time I have EVER missed a school function of either of my children, and I only missed it because I literally couldn’t be there. Really, of all the things I missed, I missed that the most.

At least it came with a cash prize, and she went out immediately and spent it lavishly on really silly fashion.

I am SO proud of her!

Things are back to normal here in Lala Land (If you don’t like dogs, don’t look at this post)

Here’s Sez the Wobbly Dog (being happily laid on by Masters in Energy Transference); T and Johann (the Masters); Maxi (his glinting eye in this pic giving the lie to his unending patience); and Balu the devil dog (my little bear), as always almost too dark to see.

Happy, on the single divan on the verandah.

My perfect child

Between nursing a recalcitrant patient, studying for matric and running a relatively large household, my daughter had little time for fun. But she did take a night off to go to a Hallowe’en party. Here she is with her boyfriend, ready to hit the town.



Interestingly enough, she came home in a different T-shirt, which makes me think the party was a usual crazy valley one. And a couple of days later I received this pic via email, of our friend Tequila Steve wearing hers. Hmm...

Spine surgery

A discectomy is where a surgeon removes parts of a damaged vertebral disc or, as in my case, the entire thing. I was a little disappointed at how small the incision was and how neatly it had been stitched and taped up. I kind of felt I deserved something longer, and with punctuated staple marks down either side of a raw red welt. (Well, c’mon: value for money? The damn thing cost me practically my entire life savings.)

My daughter, who had over the preceding weeks coped with all sorts of things a teenager shouldn’t have to, lost her bottle when it came to removing the holding stitches. Johann (of course) did it. And some days later, when I asked her to check the wound to make sure it was clean and healing properly (it’s down low on my back, not easily visible even with the help of a mirror), she literally squealed. ‘I’m not doing this any more!’ she said. So Johann did it.

Waiting to go home from the hospital

There were many mad cow jokes about these pyjamas, not least by the donors of them, Ronaldo and his preternaturally beautiful woman, M. I can’t remember this photo being taken thanks to the miraculous powers of morphine. (In the pic I am lying in the hospital reception, waiting for Ronaldo to tell the receptionist that I promised faithfully to pay the bill before whisking me back home.)

Mercifully, I remember very little before it was taken either, when I was seized by a powerful back spasm as my damaged spinal disc ruptured and flung to the floor, bereft of breath but generously gifted in the hysterical tears department, necessitating a rude interruption of Johann’s spiritual health for a speedy and tense drive to the hospital. There, excessively costly medical personnel did all manner of interesting things to me involving X-rays, MRIs, scalpels and anaesthetics, after which (again, thanks to morphine) two of the only things I remember were being able to pee for the first time in countless weeks without screaming in agony and vomiting copiously into my father’s lap. (Sorry, Dad.)

A measure of the lengths my friends and family went to to help me through this awful time was the spine specialist telling me that surgery was necessary immediately, and not least because ‘it is clear your husband is at the very end of his tether’. Morphined to the eyebrows (and I can’t tell you how much I love morphine, really), I said in dreamy tones, ‘My husband? But I don’t have a husband.’ The spine specialist said, ‘Well, the man who checked you in was in a state of near collapse. He simply can’t take it any more.’ Johann.

Before hospital I was bedridden for almost six weeks. Johann came every single day. He lay in bed with me while I moaned and groaned and occasionally cried frantic tears of frustration and pain (and also fetched and carried kids, brought supplies, made meals, etc etc etc). T (Maxi’s Mom) was in constant contact and cared for me, my dogs and my children in equal measure. And my daughter Bella, who at the time was studying for her matric exams, took over the day-to-day running of the household, and when I threw tantrums (and I did, I am sorry to say), had the amazing (and very un-teenage) compunction to not only not take offence, but ignore my pathetic behaviour and just keep on keeping on.

Simply astonishing human beings.

An unusual birthday

On Sunday 18 October, the day before my 45th birthday, my sister and her husband travelled out to the little village where I live and cooked a fabulous meal for me and company. My friends T (Maxi’s Mom) and Johann, who by then had been on near-24-hour call for me for more than a month (going well above and beyond the normal call of duty) joined them, me, my gorgeous children and another friend, L, plus my Dad, around a lunch table that I couldn’t sit at, but which I lay very happily beside.

This photograph was taken late that evening (from left going clockwise, T, me, my daughter and son, L and Johann). These are my friends and children on my bed with me, which is where, perforce, time had to be spent in my company. The hairstyles are entirely T’s fault.

This photograph, of Johann in hysteria and me in the position I occupied for the better part of three months, prompted Johann to remark later, ‘God, but we’re fun!’ And there I was thinking it was because we were drunk.

In spite of my immobility and a regime of powerful medications (or, okay, maybe because of those), I drank a lot of wine and smoked a lot of cigarettes on my birthday. The hangover was, naturally, appalling, but it was worth every second.

Goodbye to my dear old dog Duke

This morning my Old Faithful, Duke, hobbled off to the big bone-heap in the sky. He didn't do this voluntarily: it was I who took him to a vet and instructed her to administer the killing injection.  Even though I've agonised over this for months, I feel like a right, heartless bastard for ending Duke's life, and I'm not proud of myself.  Every time I think of his dear old grizzled face I start weeping again, and wish I'd changed my mind.

If I had done so, he'd be snoozing at my feet right now, whimpering, shivering and letting off the most atrocious old-dog farts.

The vet asked if I'd like to be there in what she called his 'final moments'.

I declined. I gave him a hard hug, scratched him once behind his fleabitten old ears, and walked out out of the building carrying his empty collar.  Every time I think of his last look at me - an expression of utter trust, adoration, and fervent hope for a juicy bone - I want to smack my head against a wall.

RIP, you grand, friendly old dawg.

The whistling halls of our neglected blog

I know this blog is whistling eerily in the wind, with tumbleweeds spinning through its echoing halls, but I would like to assure you that both Muriel and I are still alive and thrashing (well, I'm thrashing; Muriel, dear girl, is writhing).

She's still in bed, five weeks after slipping a disc in her back, and here is an SMS update from her: 'Not much improvement to back, alas - still unable to sit and battling to walk. One more week in bed and the doctors will "reassess". Still determined not to have op but fast running out of options." (No txt spk for our Mur: she writes full essays, with perfect spelling and punctuation, when she sends an SMS.)

She sounds sanguine enough, but if I know Muriel she is probably tearing tufts from her scalp, gnawing the headboard and swearing like a sailor.  No one wants to be pancaked for five weeks, but for an energetic tornado of a gal,  it must be, well, terrible, Muriel.  She is definitely not the languishing sort. 

I know she will snort  if you offer her syrupy sympathies, so here are some suggestions about how to gladden her heart:

- send lots of email chain letters, appeals and petitions.
- forward any Nigerian scam emails you receive; she loves these and always sends fat cheques, which place not the slightest dimple in her bulging bank account.
- phone her at midnight, and every two hours thereafter, for a heart-to-heart. Use her land-line number, not her cell number.  We do not want to encourage laziness in Muriel.
- send the Jehovah's Witnesses to her house, and tell them to knock repeatedly on her bedroom window, because the doorbell isn't working.
- park your car outside her bedroom window and pump up the volume!  Muriel loves music, especially rap and boeremusiek.

An orphaned, feeble puppy or kitten placed on the kerb, and pinched hard so that it whimpers all night, may also do the trick.

If all else fails, send a group of young, perfect mothers over to Muriel's place, and encourage them to bring their toddlers!  There is nothing she appreciates more than a gang of feral toddlers exploring her house and its cupboards, and the louder they scream and perform, the more cheerful she becomes.  Muriel believes that parents should take an entirely hands-off approach to young children and frowns on parents who selfishly try to discipline their offspring.

I have nimbly avoided explaining why I've not posted for so long on this blog. OK. Although my excuse is not iron-clad, like Muriel's, here it is, anyway:  I'm moving, with my kids, to Cape Town in five weeks' time, to join my dearest, who has been living and working there for the past few months.

The sheer amount of admin involved - packery, throw-outery, house-sellery, change-addressery stuff - has kept me on the hop, and I'm also studying for the matric exams of my eldest son, who writes his first proper exam in a fortnight.  So I'm pretty busy, but I will be back here, and blogging wildly, once the dust settles and we are all snuggled together in our new nest in Hout Bay.  (Which will only be ours if we sell our existing house, and soon.)

Muriel has a hernia

If you fans of Salmagundi are wondering about the yawning Muriel-shaped hole in this blog, I am sorry to tell you that she has been arrested, deported and flung into a filthy prison on St. Helena, where she will rot in despair for the rest of her days, and good riddance to Her Terribleness.

Okay, that's not strictly true, but I am sure Muriel would prefer gnawing her own wrists in a squalid cell to what she's going through now. Muriel has a herniated spinal disc and has damaged her sciatic nerve: she is now mostly immobile, in excruciating pan, and has to be crowbarred off the ceiling every few hours to be force-fed a new dose of painkillers. Here's more from her email:

"It has been endless rounds of docs and specialists and piles of meds and mainly staying in bed. And also spending about two hours a day standing at my computer – I can’t sit and can only lie on my left side, it is too dire – to try to get the most basic work done so I can keep earning some kind of paltry living.

"Having been offered an operation that will cost 'up to R100 000' (said the spine specialist, casually), I have completely abandoned mainstream medicine and am now under the care of a chiropractor who pummels and yanks me and hangs me upside down twice a week. He thinks he can get me right but has warned that it will take a long time – maybe up to two more months – I am going mad with frustration.

"The pain is unbelievable so I am on constant pain meds that make me a bit stoned (which is actually quite nice) but it doesn’t make for a clean brain.

"Thank God for my amazing friends and my amazing daughter who have kept the household running and have been doing all the running around and transport, etc, including lifting and carrying me to docs all over the bloody province (a genuine downside of living in the middle of nowhere!)."

So, how can we cheer her up? Grapes? Filthy jokes? Normally, I would advise sending a few crates of tequila, but perhaps we shouldn't encourage her to mix her meds. Big kisses, Mur.

Maddened by Jozi's aggressive vendors and window-washers

I've tried to be gracious, generous and friendly as I've driven around Johannesburg over the past 17 years. Really, I have. I've always tipped unpushy parking guards, always greeted road-side vendors (while politely declining their wares), and always dished out random rolling car-coins (what my cousins charmingly call 'shrapnel') to blind beggars, street children and the heart-breaking human flotsam and jetsam on the streets of Johannesburg. Like most drivers in Johannesburg, I have a chatty (albeit paternalistic, I admit) relationship with the 'regulars' on the street corners on my various routes.

I don't want to sound prissy, but I have always believed that how you behave towards destitute people defines you as a person: if you can't give something to them, the very least you can do is offer a cheery greeting and a little facile banter, followed up, if necessary, by a firm refusal.

This is all very well when you're dealing with, say, five or seven or even ten road-side beggars a day. But how about thirty people at a time?

In the past two years or so, the number of roadside peddlers, beggars, panhandlers, vagabonds and window-smashers has increased tenfold, due, no doubt, to crushing economic times, and - gee, thanks, Mad Bob Mugabe - to a flood of ragged refugees from Zimbabwe. And so, too, has the level of aggression at intersections. Particularly towards women drivers.

I hesitate to pull out the gender card here, but I have noticed that, as a woman driver, you definitely get the short end of the stick.

I drive though the Grayston Drive intersection in Sandton on average 18 times a week. Every time I do, I count the number of panhandlers at the intersection, and it is never less than 38 individuals operating on two sets of traffic lights. Yes, you read that right: thirty eight!

If these vendors peacefully peddled their goods, I would have no objection - after all, I'd far prefer that they were making a living selling stuff than resorting to crime. But the sheer doggedness and belligerence of these vendors is just wearing me down.

Swarms of 'window washers' - young, swaggering men armed with plastic bottles - besiege my car and any car in the vicinity that seems like a soft target: that is, in the main, cars with women drivers. They squirt soapy water on the windscreen and proceed to 'wash' it. I shake my head and flap my hands to indicate a 'no thanks', but to no avail.

When they're finished smudging my window, they demand payment by thrusting a hand towards my open window. I respond by driving off, at speed. If the traffic light is red, and I am stuck there, I roll up my window and look away, infuriated. Most vendors walk away, resigned, but some of them get nasty: I've had my car bonnet thumped, my side mirrors bashed and, last week, a threat as a young thug drew his finger across his neck in a throat-cutting gesture.

Infuriated, I rolled down the window and, in my bossiest mommy voice, gave it straight back to him by wagging my finger and promising to have him arrested. He jeered, made a lascivious thrusting gesture with his groin and gave me the middle finger. Then I drove off, heart pounding, and dissolved in infuriated, helpless sobs.

I am terrified by this, and I'm enraged too. All I want is to go peacefully about my business, without harassment or abuse. And, damn it, am I, as Jane Citizen, not entitled to feel safe and secure?

And I'm sick of hearing the Metro police force making excuses about why these intersections aren't properly policed. The most common excuse is, 'We move them along or arrest them, but they return the next day. And, besides, we can't be everywhere all the time'.

Well, duh, isn't the answer to have a permanent police presence - just one car would do - at the worst-affected major intersections in Johannesburg? (The Greyston intersection, the Nichol Highway offramp and the main Bruma intersection are just a few that spring to mind). And, please, Mr Metro Plod, don't insult my intelligence by telling me you don't have the manpower: how about pulling several hundred of your officers out from behind the bushes where they're hiding with their speed cameras, and putting them to work making intersections safe? Look, you're going to lose a lot of traffic-fine revenue, but the idea behind a metropolitan police force is to enforce the law and keep citizens safe, not swell State coffers.

God, I'm maddened by this. What's more (and I love to pull the World-Cup card here): if I, as a tough old Jo-burger with eyes all over the back of my head, am afraid to drive through a busy intersection that is as familiar to me as the back of my hand, how do you think a carload of hapless tourists are going to feel?

Kika, the content thief: blog plagiarism at its most brazen

I don't know why I still get upset about this. It's not unusual, at all, for bloggers to steal, lift, nick and plunder other people's work: it happens all the time, often in the most subtle of ways.

But I do get my knickers in a knot when I stumble across bloggers who brazenly pinch the work of freelance professionals who have spent years, even decades, honing their craft, and who are trying to earn a living from the fruits of their labours.

I am more or less resigned to the fact that, if you post content online, the chances are that sooner or later someone will re-use or rehash what you've written or photographed. I don't mind this, generally speaking, because I do believe in the free exchange of information, particularly when whoever's reproduced that content takes the trouble to acknowledge its source.

But I do get maddened when I see amateurs passing off someone else's excellent work as their own. I suppose my outrage stems from the fact that I know, from long experience, how difficult it is to make money as a freelance writer, and how many years it takes to build a portfolio and make a name for yourself.

My old pal Rob Woodburn, a South African who has lived in Australia for many years now, is a freelance photographer, journalist and travel writer whose compelling blog, Lost in Transit, is packed with superb photographs and high-quality travel articles. Lost in Transit was the first travel blog to appear in the online editions of two leading Australian newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and the blog has a significant and devoted following.

This prestige has not deterred a certain Australian blogger, one 'Kika' (no surname, no contact details) of Sydney, from audaciously lifting Rob's photographs and text, and passing them off as her own work.

Is it possible that 'Kika' genuinely doesn't realise that lifting text and photographs without permission is not acceptable? Maybe. Then again, maybe not: if you have the savvy to create your own blog, I reckon you should know full well that stealing is stealing, whichever way you slice it.

I am tempted to post a picture of this Kika here, so you can identify her, but, then again, I'd have to take it off her personal blog, and that would be stealing.

What would you ask your dog, if you could?

Imagine a genie hoists itself out of your beer bottle one night and says, 'You have five minutes in which to ask your dog ten things. Your dog will give you truthful answers, in your own language.'

This is the question I asked my 10-year-old daughter, as we were wedged in traffic on the way to fetch her brothers from school. I was fascinated by the selection of questions she wanted to ask our basset hound, Velvet (in pic, left) , and equally intrigued by the questions offered by my teen sons.

After much debate (which - hooray! - made the hour-long trek home whizz past) we came up with the following shortlist. In no particular order:

1. Can you converse with other dogs, and, if so, what do you talk about?
2. What is your real dog name, if you have one? And what are the names of the other dogs in the family?
3. Why do you poke your head out of the window when you travel in a car?
4. Do you really feel cross, anxious, sad, jealous or afraid, or am I just reading too much into your expression?
5. Do you have dreams, and what do you dream about?
6. Who is your favourite in our human family, and why?
7. What's the pecking order in this house? In other words, who is the top dog, and who is the top human?
8. Do you have any complaints, or something you'd like to tell me?
9. Would it be possible for you to not poop in the house?
10. Why do you love me?

Other suggestions received, but rejected as being too obvious, or too difficult to answer, included:

- Where do you like to be scratched?
- What on earth is so appealing about sniffing other dogs' bottoms?
- Why do you howl and whine when you can't come inside?
- What does it feel like to be a dog?
- Why don't you listen when I tell you something?
- What do humans smell like?

So, what would you ask your dog? Or your cat? And what would you tell your pet, if a genie gave you the opportunity?

The War of the Inanimate Objects

My Aunt Janet, who lives in Manchester, is an intrepid traveller but it must be said that she seldom returns home from a jaunt without an injury of some kind. Her latest trip was to visit my father and his girlfriend Catherine at Catherine's home outside of Amsterdam. There, his lifelong engagement in The War Of the Inanimate Objects conspired evilly with Janet’s innate proneness to accidents. Here’s my father’s account of events.

The day that Catherine’s Blackberry hid itself in a balloon was the day I realised that we might be losing The War of the Inanimate Objects.

You’ve all been in the firing line. With the chair leg that makes contact with your big toe when you’re not wearing shoes. With the knife that takes a slice out of your finger when you’re chopping onions. With the car door that closes on your fingers, the lemon juice that squirts directly into your eye, the screw that you drop on the floor and never find again...

The balloon was a hot-air monster in which Catherine, a Dutch TV presenter, was doing a shoot for a travel series. When she disembarked, her cellphone didn’t. It was slyly out of sight in the basket that was last seen heading for the outskirts of Amsterdam. Score one to the enemy.

Then at 3.30 in the morning the onslaught really begins. The burglar alarm, which isn’t primed, decides to come alive. And stay alive. No amount of putting the code into the keyboard will switch if off. We can’t hear the first telephone call from the alarm company because – you’ve got it – the alarm is shrieking away. Janet suggests I switch off all the power and switch it on again. I switch it off. The alarm doesn’t stop. I switch it on again. Nothing happens. We’re in total darkness. Score two to the enemy.

The alarm company is now trying to phone a mobile landline that has no power. They can’t phone Catherine’s cellphone because it’s in the hot-air balloon. We go outside to get away from the noise. I make contact with the alarm company with my South African cellphone. For security reasons they need to phone me back but don’t have international roaming facilities. Score three.

After a minute or two the power comes back on. But we’re now outside, in the street, Catherine wearing only her bathrobe, me in my Bjorn Borg underpants (the paparazzi would have had a field day). The front door closes and locks. We don’t have a key. The score is 4-0.

I bang on the door. Janet and her husband Brian can’t hear me because the alarm is still wailing. But finally I manage to get their attention. Janet rushes to open the door, and trips and falls down the stairs. Score five.

Brian opens the door. Janet is moaning on the floor. Catherine runs around, making an ice pack for Janet’s ankle. The alarm is still shrieking. Finally we make contact with the security company again and receive instructions how to disconnect the alarm from a mass of electronics that looks like the arming system of a nuclear bomb.

Final score: 5-1. Plus we have no burglar alarm system, I have a bed-ridden sister with a severely twisted ankle and a ruined holiday, and Catherine has sleepless neighbours who are not amused and a dog traumatised by the bizarre behaviour of the humans she’s been brought up to love and trust. And there’s still the prospect of a drive through morning horror traffic jams to Amsterdam to collect the Blackberry.

So who says that inanimate objects are exactly that? That they don’t retaliate? And here we are surrounded by them. The War goes on. Watch out for that banana peel.

If it's already bad now, what am I going to be like when I’m old?

I’ve always been a jump-up-and-down sort of girl: running, swimming, cycling, dancing, that sort of thing. And I’ve had twinges in the past, but they’ve usually been utterly explainable (hip and knee damage from running, for example, and if that isn’t a reason not to run I don’t know what is).

So when I woke up last Monday (that’s 10 days ago) unable to get out of bed, and established that I wasn’t handcuffed to the bedposts and hadn’t had my limbs sawn off in the night by a crazy person, I was a bit worried.

It was Johann’s fault, obviously. Johann, on a Sunday-night drinking spree (these things happen in these parts), thought it immensely entertaining to leave not one, not two, not even three… okay, EIGHT SMS messages on my Telkom landline.

What happens when you leave a cellphone text message on a Telkom landline is this. It goes into a computer. In the computer sits a Ken-doll-type man with his brain removed and a synthesizer clamped to his voicebox, which blurts out a bizarre American accent. And when he gets your message, he dials your landline number and repeats it, twangily verbatim.

But the thing is, he does dial your number. And your landline does ring.

I very, very seldom answer my landline (as Rosie and Ronaldo, the only two people left on the planet who still call it, should know by now). But that doesn’t stop it ringing.

When it rings, I know this: It’s either Ronaldo (in which case I’ll talk to him annoyedly or phone back at a more convenient hour on my cellphone) or Rosie (and then it’s for my daughter, and in order not to kill both of them I do a brisk few laps of my bedroom walls); or someone trying to sell me something I can promise you beyond a shadow of a doubt that I don’t want (not even if it comes with a ‘free’ blow-up mattress or apparently all-expenses-paid holiday for two to Mauritius provided you attend a time-share seminar).

So I obviously enormously didn’t appreciate Johann’s eight Ken-doll Telkom-voicemail phonecalls last Sunday night, and every time the phone rang I tensed up in bed and thought, ‘If I knew who that f*cker was I’d tear them limb from limb.’ And I’m pretty sure that’s where the back problem started.

(Johann wasn’t at all fazed. ‘Don’t you love having such interesting friends?’ he SMSd me the next morning, when I texted him to tell him that he’d done irreparable damage to the muscles that enable me to stand upright.)

Ag, but you know life goes on, and by last Wednesday I’d been bitten by about a gazillion bastard midges and even if I couldn’t bend down or stretch around to scratch the suppurating welts because my back was too sore, the suppurating welts took my mind off the fact that I couldn’t stand upright.

But now, genuinely, I can’t stand upright. I finally caved and phoned the local physio and begged her for an appointment. She was shamefully unsympathetic and told me she couldn’t see me until Friday. (Friday!) So I got in my car and drove 25km to the next town (the nearest place with a chemist) and told the pharmacist on duty what my problem was.

‘And have you tried a heat pad?’ she said.

I clutched the counter. My eyes might have bugged a bit and it’s possible I foamed slightly at the mouth. ‘I’m begging you,’ I said, ‘and it would be on bended knee if I only bloody could. Give. Me. Some. Scheduled. Drugs.’

She did. (She told me not to tell anyone. So I’m only telling you. Don’t you tell anyone.)

Unfortunately I did also tell her that I needed to ‘think’ (why?) so she hasn’t given me anything even vaguely hallucinogenic. But the relief of not having to drag my ailing body around like Quasimodo simply can’t be described.

I’m really worried about what I’m going to do when my body breaks down for good. Thank god Johann is going to be there to look after me.

Moving swiftly on from the snail house

My daughter’s snail house was such a hit that my friend Wicked Mick helped his daughter make one too. And when an art-exhibit opportunity came up in our village that encompassed a box that was, after all, more or less the dimensions of the snail house, my daughter thought she’d like to reproduce it for a wider audience.

But things happened between the planning and execution stages. There was, firstly, a dream: one that, shared during a brisk walk with the dogs, became the inspiration for a new box project – a bed. A populated bed.

Then, the things that crept into – that populated – the bed were made of silver foil, and so ‘The Shining’ suggested itself as a topic.

This bed was discussed and planning done, and even some execution, but then more inspiration came (at a very late date; indeed, well past the deadline) from an unexpected source: Johann, grumpy from an afternoon nap, needing some sort of diversion. If he weren’t 43 years old, I would have given him a Farley’s rusk and put him in his bouncy chair. My daughter, who’s had long experience with a baby brother, knew what was needed.

‘I’m making this bed,’ she said, plonking it down on the kitchen counter next to Johann’s lower jaw, ‘and I need to populate it.’

This is what emerged. It might not cut the mustard as an artwork, but we like it.

Here’s what we have in ‘Populated: The Shining’: An alien woman in a luxurious bed, clutching a teddy and holding a lollipop; a worm; a cat; a dog; a notebook; a laptop; a die; a bottle of wine and a glass; a blancmange with a spoon; a rose in a vase; and (the ‘shinings’) a scary monster with red eyes and a forked tongue and an octopus-like creature emerging from under the duvet, having snagged one extremely alarmed teddy, reaching out a silvery tendril to get the other.

* Click on the pictures for better views.

No-see-ums... but SO-feel-ums

When I lived in the city, midges took one form, in my experience: tiny, deeply annoying insects that flew into your open mouth while you were doing your morning run (when once you partook of such outlandish activities) and lodged round about your uvula, causing you to stop, hunched over, hands on knees, hawking and spitting so alarmingly that passing motorists screeched to a halt and kindly offered to call emergency services.

In the country, midges are different. They are, like in the city, practically invisible; but here the little bastards bite. Not that you feel them when they do: they’re called ‘No-see-ums’ in North America, apparently, for this very reason.

But good god do you feel the effects!

I knew nothing of biting midges when I first moved to this small country town nine years ago. So once, when I was sweeping my pool and my neighbour came around for a chat, and, after observing a cloud of the little buggers around my head for a few minutes, said, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t watch this,’ I didn’t know what he meant. Until the next morning, when I woke up entirely transformed into something festooned with weeping sores, with puffy cheeks and leaking eyes, and very very sorry for itself.

I’m not alone in this: miggie fever grips a few sad members of our community for a few months each year, transforming them from relatively ordinary human beings into twitching, scratching, suppurating, terribly tired aliens.

Does anyone out there know why country midges differ so intensely from their city cousins? My friend T (who suffers as I do – and ‘suffer’ isn’t a word I use lightly for the fallout from these bites: symptoms range from a flu-like feeling to deep muscle aches and utter exhaustion that can go on for days at a time) suspects it may have something to do with the chemicals used in crop-spraying in these parts, and I have to wonder if she has a point.

Any ideas?

Click here for more about biting midges.

Dogs that lick loudly

As any regular reader of salma knows, I think my dogs are among the most fantastically amazing creatures on the planet (yes, even The Worst Dog In The World). But having dogs brings with it several unpleasantnesses, including but not limited to dog farts (which actually make me angry I find them so offensive), large quantities of money that could better be used to buy wine having to be handed over to the vet, and a car backseat that will never be the same again.

But it wasn’t until a particular unpleasantness was confirmed by my friend Amanda that I realised there’s yet another annoyance that certain dogs come with: loud licking.

Now, I know most dogs lick. The Worst Dog In The World licks everything all the time. (She tries to lick me dry when I get out the shower. It drives me completely crazy.) But that’s kind of general, all-purpose licking, and it’s usually not too noisy.

Loud licking – the schlurping, schnuffling, slooshy kind – usually happens at night, when all else is still. And loud licking is one of the very few unpleasantnesses that can be ascribed to Sara the Wobbly Dog aka The Best Dog In The World. But goodness me is it unpleasant.

Both my dogs sleep in baskets beside my bed and often I wake up in the (otherwise) quiet hours to this noise, which can only be described as very, very nasty. It sounds like a humungous vampire bat sucking every last drop of blood from its equally humungous prey; it is actually Sara, choosing the inappropriate hour of 3am to give her bottom a jolly good wash.

Not wanting to wake up completely, I usually lie still and scream as loudly as my sleepy vocal chords will allow, ‘Shut up!’ (I often have to remove a cat from my head to do this.)

This frequently has the profoundly unwelcome result of sending The Worst Dog In The World into barking frenzies, so is clearly not the solution.

Lately I’ve taken to sitting up, switching on the bedside light, and then staring in mute but total outrage at Sara (often while removing a cat from my head).

Sara then instils gigantic guilt in me by stopping her loud licking immediately, but also freezing as if in mortal terror; sometimes she will roll her eyes and stare back at me, her expression infinitely sad (as illustrated).

It reminds me of when my father would take my three siblings and me to the Milky Lane in Hillbrow on a Sunday afternoon for an ice cream treat, and I’d order a chocolate double-thick and, lost in pleasure, I would get right down to the bottom and then suck through the straw with all my strength to get the very last drop. As the strains of the massive slurping sound died away, I would look around, immensely satisfied, and realise that my father was staring at me with an expression that told me very clearly that the minute we got back into the car I was going to get a big fat walloping. And that, apparently, is the expression I now use on Sara.

The Thompson brothers recover from the weekend

Dazzle is under the red blanket.

Dean is under the blue.

Our ancient and creaky dog: do we move him, or kill him?

We have, in one corner, our ancient staffie, Duke. At almost fourteen, he is arthritic, creaky, stone-deaf, and riddled with skin cancer. He's an elderly, grizzled old chap who is too sore to jump up on a couch, who pees everywhere and who limps around our home with a pained but cheerful attitude. He's had a hip replacement, a knee replacement and about five thousand other procedures during his life. All he can really do, at his age, is snooze by the fire and gently deflate.

I'm not an enthusiastic dog lover, but I do have a deep affection for Duke, who has been my constant companion over many years. He's snoozed at my fire, snored on my pillow, licked the dinner dishes clean and - thank you, Duke - saved me twice from being bitten by other dogs during our early-morning walks in the suburbs.

In the other corner, we have a family - mine! - who is moving house and city, from Jo'burg to Cape Town - in three months' time. Our two younger dogs - tiresome but loveable basset hounds - will come with us, but what to do with Duke? Should we put him through the trauma of a move to a new house in a new city? Put him on a train, a plane, or in a car?

Or should we bid him farewell? In polite parlance, 'put him down'?

That is, ask the vet to kill him?

Or, if we take him along, are we really being fair to him?

Is it fair to prolong the life of this dear old dog just because I'll miss him?

You tell me, because I don't know what to do.

Thoughts on death and stuff

Dean, T and I were talking about death the other night – are we afraid of it? where do we go when we shuffle off? what will our atoms be reconstituted as? – and Dean came up with something interesting: ‘We spend our entire lives accumulating stuff that can be packed up in one day.’

True. Anyone who’s moved house knows that (a) you always have more stuff than you think you do; and (b) nevertheless, you can usually shift the whole lot in one day, although obviously usually with help.

It puts an interesting perspective on the value we place on objects. Everyone knows you can’t take it with you when you go, and when you die, whatever ‘it’ might be – car, flat-screen TV, sound system, bed, wardrobe of clothing, artworks, books, whatever – loses any value you placed on it while you were alive and becomes something that must be disposed of in some way. It surprised me, when my Mom died some years ago, how quickly my sisters and I were able to whip through her fairly extensive wardrobes and divvy stuff up into piles – some for us, some for her friends and some for various charities. It seemed, I don’t know, weird that after she’d spent 64 years on the planet, we could dispose of most of her belongings in a couple of hours.

(And we loved finding, even after she’d been deathly ill for 18 months, one or two of her ‘hidden purchases’. Although my father, a very generous man, never put any kind of limit on what my mother could spend money on, she – a child of the Scottish ghetto who grew up during The War – never could shake feelings of guilt when she bought something entirely for herself. She only ever bought on sales, and even then, she’d secretly show her newest pants or skirt or pair of shoes to us, her daughters, then hide them away in the back of her wardrobe, to be taken out and worn with elaborate casualness at some later date. In the extremely unlikely event my father noticed she had on something he hadn’t seen before and said, ‘That’s a nice dress, Jess. Is it new?’ she could say with a clear conscience, ‘This old thing? Oh, I’ve had it for months.’)

Another great leveller when it comes to things we ‘value’ is having children and/or pets. I remember watching with open-mouthed dismay (and from too far away to stop him) as my then 2-year-old son dropped, with quiet concentration and really rather admirable precision, a precious chain-and-pendant of mine down a drain. I felt like dropping him down after it and to be honest I still miss that pendant. But who will care when I’m dead? It was only a thing, and it meant something only to me.

And when an excitable pet sweeps an costly knick-knack off a table with its tail or jumps up and tears a pricey top, well, there’s a lesson in that too: don’t spend your hard-earned bucks on expensive stuff. (Buy wine rather, or go away to a new exciting place, or make a fat donation to a children’s or animals’ welfare.)

Of course, this high-minded kind of thinking works only when your friends buy into it too. I told T today that, following a week of misery from miggie-bite poisoning (biting midges are a spring terror in this part of the country, and I have a nasty allergic reaction to them), I thought I might die. ‘Well, if you do,’ she said, ‘remember that you promised to leave the tapestry in your lounge to me.’