The Musing Magpie

Gosh - how time flies when you're having fun! My 'Malema, A Love Letter' project has so comsumed me over the last few weeks that I've had no extra time for writing at all. But now that the project is happily established with around 2 - 4 letters a day arriving, and 10+ members joining a day, I feel like all my blood, sweat and tears has paid off and now I can sit back a little and breathe. And write! *wink*
Only 7 weeks to go until we hop on at Heathrow to catch a jumbo home for, hopefully, the last time ever! Now the messy limbo I caused 6 months agp by prematurely packing the house up can be sorted - beginning with the treasured pieces of furniture which need to be eBayed ASAP. (*sob*)
Item #1: a gorgeously divine china cabinet which I have never been able to accurately date, but can only guess comes from the 1950s (or the 60s? 70s?!) At the local recycling plant (a.k.a the rubbish dump!) I spotted it glimmering and singing, just for me, amidst the dark, dusty cabinets and bookshelves under the dank lean-to, where the okes in charge try to suss the size of your wallet out and charge you accordingly. Craig bought it for 20 GBP - which for an antique-starved South African, was an utter bargain sent from decorating/magpie heaven! With its gold leafing and prettiest pink flowers curling with endless elegance around the glass doors, not a single day has gone by that I am not seduced into silently, breathlessly admiring its girly perfection! (I guess you can sense my impending heartache at our parting, hey?)
Item #2: A week or so after Layla was born, Craig arrived home (after some or other little errand he ran so kindly for me on his paternity leave) with a slightly rain-damaged but still salvage-worthy Singer sewing machine table - which became the home for our laptop, speakers, phone and a million other random odds-and-sods.
Item #3: The world's most marvellous easel - which I bought for 110 GBP when I lived in England before - and stored by an even more marvellous friend (even though we have no idea I would ever set foot in England again!) Alas, it will have to find a sunny corner in another artist's studio - and hopefully infuse her with the same magic it gave to me!
Items #4 & #5: one of our local haunts, the Holcot car-boot sale, proffered up weekly treasure hunts for this silly little magpie here - and when she saw these two
incredibly, unbelievably Art Deco mirrors, she ran to the stall (eyes glazed over in gimme-rapture), hardly believing her ears when the kind girl selling them said, "For you - 3 quid. For both." (Actually, I may just leave all my clothes behind -- better to be the madly happy owner of two Art Deco mirrors, I say!) I wonder how many souls these mirrors have captured in their heavy glass? Who were they? What were they thinking? What did they look like?

It's time for bed, and a weekend in which I will try to refine the excited babble in my head into inspiring sound-bytes for my radio interview on Radio 2000's Breakfast Show (8.20am - South African time: *hint, hint*)

Treasure Hunt!

At last! A moment to indulge my almost forgotten passion!! Layla's asleep next to me in her pram - who knows for how long?! So while the sun shines, I shall make hay!

Windy and only very slightly chilly, the carboot sale in Holcot (the next little village along from us) was jampacked with carbooters and treasure-hunters on the forage for all that glitters. (Perhaps not all of them are magpies like me?!) Craig tends to whip along ahead of me, weaving inbetween the doddering, dithering masses, his eyes fanatically fine-tuned to pick out Stephen King novels from among all the rest of the books stuffed into crates on the muddy grass, or lined up higgledy-piggledy on wonky trestle tables. (He already owns 95% of Stephen King's novels - so his pickings on Saturday rendered nothing at all...)
I, on the other hand, discovered a bounty of deliciousness! But with only a few coins jangling hopefully in my pocket, CHOICE had to overrule my usually spontaneous shopping methodology. Also, haggling with an Englishman is not so different to bartering with other sorts of tribes - and I managed to get all sorts of little goodies thrown in for free or half-price. (It helps to plead poverty while holding out your 'only' pound coin, of course.)
Lounging in their rusty, forlon cars, haggard, semi-toothless women stare into the lonely space between milling customers, a drooping fag trailing smoke, caught on the moist part of the lower lip as though glued. Old men, busy busy busy, their crates of fish hooks, lures and reels of gut proudly displayed -- my eye drawn to the wooden boxes shimmering with the rainbows of finely twined feathers of fishing flies, protected behind glass, like rare butterflies caught in the depths of a jungle. Down-and-out couples selling off their old, dusty TV, their children's greying, stained baby clothes - and arbitrary knick-knacks I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy! And then, there are the prim, middle-aged ladies, their wares arranged artfully along tables carefully lain with starched white cotton tablecloths. Here you can find little Murano glass bowls, 1920s paste jewellery, marquesite brooches and jewellery boxes that make you wonder who their owner was, what was she like?
My discoveries included: a 1950s Bakelite 'black' doll, and an empty sweet tin - also circa 1950s. Four blood-red perspex hearts the size of dinner plates. Two boxes of chocolate incense. A collection of the most divine plates, tea cups and a bowl - possibly 1920s: the sweetest candy pink, handpainted embellishments in white, gold and turquoise. GORGEOUS!!! Another 1950s find: a silver-plated and red glass sugar bowl and spoon. PERFECT for my tea parties!

Our little Petal/Daffodil/Pepperpot (Craig's nicknames for Layla) will be 11 weeks on Thursday! And she weighs a healthy 10lb 2oz (4.6kg, I think.) She is constantly ravenous - and prefers to snack all day long, instead of gorging on a few large meals. This means a bit more work for me - but at least her reflux is under control this way! Anyone got any advice??

On cravings and carboot sales

What a GLORIOUS sunshiney day!! For the last 5 days we've showered in bucketfuls of hot, gold sunshine - Summer's way of apologising at last?! What would we do with this magnificent day? With what could we fill it?
Seeing as we missed yesterday's carboot sale in Holcot which must've been a whopper in this weather, we headed down to our local recycling plant where Craig'd seen a foldable rabbit run a few weeks back (while I secretly hoped it would be gone: I can't bear the thought of my sweet little bun being cooped up ALL the time...) Fanastically, the run had long been sold (lucky Max!) but I discovered all sorts of other things I didn't think I could leave without.
One was a very old, very large black and dark blue luggage trunk, stamped with R.A.F and someone now long-passed's name. Hmmm, it'd look fabulous on top of my fluffy flokati rug in the lounge as a coffee table! Then there was an old walnut dresser with perfectly filigreed brass handles which was the perfect height for the baby's nursery to serve as storage for the baby clothes AND serve as changing table! A single cup and saucer caught my eye in its white porcelain glory edged delicately in turquoise and gold lace. A tiny old Chinese jewellery box with a miniature landscape set theatrically behind a little pane of glass, each little branch and leave carved ingeniously from some pale, soft wood. A small gold latch unclasped to reveal a seductive red satin inside. Oh there was so MUCH! But the council workers who run the tip are rather like sharks, who sidle silently up to you, sniff the money-scent of you and try to determine just how much you'd be willing to pay! They can size up desire in a cold flash of an eye. And so, when our regular council-dude told me, with that cold gleam in his eye, "Thirty quid, my love," I realised we would no longer be frequenting this den of refuse and sharks --- the carboot sales in the local villages render much better quality (yes, it's still someone's refuse) stuff for just a fraction of the price! Two weeks ago we bought a beautiful cabinet for my studio space for just 2GBP!
So did I buy anything in the end? An old home-made wooden horsey on wheels that I can just see rejuvenated in some kind of paint effect. Keep it old and antiquey? If our bub is a girl, maybe I'll lacquer it in a lush fuschia pink and decorate it with gold, lace-like patterns - a la Bollywood? I'll leave it in the empty nursery and wait for our scan result on November the 3rd!
The foraging and bartering left me hungry (nothing unusual these days!) and lunch was a feast of a feta sarmie, a handful of plump, juicy cherry tomatoes and a somewhat gluttonous helping of real German sauerkraut! Mercifully, I've not begun chewing the plaster off our walls or eating handfuls of soil form the back garden, but I can certainly testify that Cravings of Pregnancy are no myth or old wives' tale: it is as real as gherkins and strawberry jam at midnight!! My cravings have been less bizarre, but certainly something I can' help but notice when one week all I want to eat is buffalo mozzarella and cherry tomatoes, and the next it's something else... (For the first time this morning, when I surveyed myself in the mirror, I felt like I actually look pregnant for the first time - and no longer like a fat vroumens! We're just 2 weeks away from the halfway point!!!!!!!!!!! If I START to describe all I'm thinking and feeling, I'll have you stuck for another hour yet, so let me say ciao ciao and see you soon ;)
PS. My poor, pounding heart needed a break from all the Stephen King books we have in our home (thanks to a certain addict called Craig) and so I found some more soothing, beautiful books - and the current one I just can't put down is "Serving Crazy with Curry" by Amulya Malladi. Reminiscent of 'Like Water for Chocolate' by Laura Esquival - but much more simple in language - and, of course, Indian in origin. (I think my looooong story about my friend Pakshi (http://thesoutpielphenomenon.blogspot.com) had me lean towards this Indian tale!)