Chutzpah/balls/voema/gusto?

With the English summer definitively here, along with its wasps and brommers, my homesickness has ebbed slightly - but this could also be the ever-present sense of excitement knowing our arrival in Cape Town is now only 6 weeks away! (Craig has whisked Layla off with him to the butcher in Kettering which sells the most fabulous boerewors: we've run out of meat having braaied three nights in a row now! But at least with my little Layla out of earshot, I can focus on some VERY important tasks that simply can't get done while I am wearing my Mommy hat. Shame, she has had the most exhausting week with her teething keeping her awake and in tears, her head perpetually damp and hot from fever... Two molars and two eye-teeth are to blame.)

Soundtrack? Miles Davis. "Summertime".
Beverage? Need to make a cuppa, but if I had a choice, it would be a 'Cafe Romano Corretto' - a shot of earthy, rich espresso married with a shot of grappa. Ah! If only! *wink*
Goal? To write a little story for my weekly iMod slot, and to follow up on some of the newspapers and journalists who've featured my 'Malema, A Love Letter' project in their articles. (After my Radio 2000 interview on Monday morning, I couldn't help myself Googling 'Malema, A Love Letter' to see where and how it was being featured 'out there'! The response has been 95% positive - with only one myopic poephol referring to the idea negatively: but you could sommer see he hadn't actually read my original story about it: he was 'picking up stompies'! The song playing now? Miles Davis's 'Weirdo'. How apt!)

The young ANC rep I met (and tried to interview, but he was more concerned about the wandering camera crew discovering him!) in London at an expo a few months ago chickened out of giving me Julius Malema's number. And perhaps, rightly so - but we need more people with chutzpah/balls/voema/gusto if South Africa is going to stop stewing in its historical juices! Anyway, someone else has stepped forward with JM's actual cellphone number (!!!) so check back here to see how my chat with Julius went! Bizarrely, I have complete and utter peace about speaking to him. Why would I be nervous or afraid, as so many have suggested? Again, I am blaming the media for pulling the wool over the eyes of the habitually passive, unthinking South African. NEWSFLASH: The news is not the gospel truth! The juicier, the bloodier the story, the more newspapers will sell, the more advertising, blah blah blah. After 'Tea with Julius' in December, I will be taking on the country's editors in a news revolution! Just watch me! (*wink*) (--- lots of winking happening today! Must be the intoxicating combination of Miles Davis and this sweet, sweet solitude!)

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*)

Curl Up & Dye – Part 2

Here's the second half to Curl Up & Dye (i), published at the fabulous iMod!

Curl Up & Dye (ii)

Curl Up & Dye (i)

It's been awhile. Far too damn long in fact. Flu that turned into a clingy lung infection that has left me bereft of energy and even the vaguest flicker of brain power. Luckily for me, antibiotics are powering through my body to kill off those nasties my body could not.
Since I last wrote, I've been trying to get a surprisingly controversial political campaign off the ground, as well as fiddling with my hairstyle. Needless to say, both situations have aggressively pushed the boundaries of both my patience, and my creativity. First off, the campaign. Ho-hum. Where to begin? Well... the responses the campaign received were varied (to be polite), and I found myself on the verge of ditching the whole shebbang in lieu of something less challenging and more likeable. But, a little encouragement here and there from the right people and the show is still on the road. And as for the hair? Ah. Now here's a story that could span a week's worth of blog posts. So, let's start at the very beginning.
Growing up with a mom and dad who had two TOTALLY different attitudes to how women should wear their hair, I am lucky to have been allowed to have had long hair, short hair, red hair, black hair, curly hair and braided hair. My mom herself endured a somewhat horrendous time with her mother's proprietorial relationship with her daughter's hair - so perhaps this is why she consciously allowed me to experiment with my own mop of ordinary, straightish, brown hair. My dad, on the other hand(and like most men), struggled with the idea of my mom's hair being any different to when he first fell in love with her. She was sixteen, gorgeous and crowned with a fall of lustrous, brunette hair that skimmed her perfect waist. So watching my dad's facial muscles twitch and jive in disappointment whenever my mom had a new haircut taught me about how much value men place on their women's hair as a sort of symbol and memorial of the very first ignition of love and her youthful beauty. (One need only look at the power of long blonde tresses over a man's mind/nether regions to agree that hair is a powerful sexual signifier compared to a woman sporting a short brunette crop.) In my first serious relationship, I suffered debilitating punishments for daring to cut or dye my hair - so that when I finally managed to leave the bugger, I relished the freedom that now lay before me in glint of the hairdresser's scissors and the shelves and shelves of Clairol, Garnier and L'Oreal. At 28 I dyed my long hair raven black, and waltzed around the bars and cafes of Cape Town in heels and lipgloss and men's stares. After too many strange encounters with weird and not-so-wonderful men, I made the decision that my long hair screamed 'come hither' too loudly, and in a bid to express myself more specifically as a bohemian, funky, not-that-available soul, I designed a bob-length hairstyle that somehow managed to be both punk/rock and yet, deliciously, mysteriously feminine. And... this is when Craig discovered me. Almost three years later, and this darling man continues on his gently persuasive quest to get me to cut and dye my hair like that. His smittenness with me in those early days, especially with my hair, convinced me that here was a man (FINALLY!) who would find me irresistable in any sort of hairstyle. But alas, he too is just a mere man - and so adheres to that rule of all husbands who treasure the erotic memory of their wife's hair when they first laid eyes on each other. (*sigh*)
(It is suddenly desperately late - so I will have to write more tomorrow... Adios, in the meantime.)

Prison Break...

It's been awhile (too long, actually) since I was last able to write. Dratted flu. But a temporary, yet nontheless magnificent hiatus, has granted me some time to write. A reprieve. How? I made the somewhat reckless decision yesterday to drive down from Northampton to Portsmouth to spend a few days with an old friend - a friend I am too afraid to admit I may never see again what with our impending move back to South Africa. Hence the hasty heart-over-head decision. The story of the car journey I shall leave for another day, fraught, as it was, with exhaustion, error and frantic despair. (Ha, the drama queen strikes again!)

The flu Craig has so generously shared with me, and now Layla, was one of the worst I can ever remember. And I've been praying under my breath that mother's prayer of, "Please don't let my child get sick...Please, please..." But by yesterday afternoon, her smooth, pale forehead began to burn with the fever I've been dreading all week. All through the night, I checked her temperature, hoping my faithfulness and fretful diligence would abolish the fever like medicine, or a talisman. But this morning, her little body had stolen the fever from her forehead and her eyes shone with the flu. She is coughing the same cough as me now. (What pisses me off is that my darling other half has already told me that if she gets the flu it'll be my fault. And as irrational as it is to believe such a claom from someone who had the same flu and was in as much proximity to his daughter as me, I feel shittily guilty. Condemned, somehow. Guilt seems to be a mother's lot. And it's something we need to fight as mothers. It will drag us down so that we will not be able to make proper sense of our children and ourselves. This guilt will blind us. This guilt causes us to lose sight of the whole 'me' that is indelibly important for our children to see. We cannot love properly if we have forgotten who we are.) Sheesh - this is pretty damn heavy for such a lovely, lazy Friday morning!!

The point I wanted to make was that I realised how my love for Layla has slipped into a form of suffocating control. As I lay next to her in bed this morning as she napped, my heart clenched shut in prayer yet again, yet the clarity that slapped me back said that I could not hope and pray my child's painless way through her life. Besides it being impossible to protect her from every illness and sadness, it was also wrong. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is actually unloving for me to entrap her inside my love. My love should be her fortress, not her prison. She should be the princess of the bastion of my heart where she can come and go, free. I'm ashamed to look back over the last year to see how I have so blindly made her the prisoner of my mother's heart.

And so, as I watch her cough or feel her cries from the aching fever tear my heart, I consciously choose to be there for her, to comfort her and meet her needs lovingly - but no more. I choose to confront the guilt as a mere imaginary spectre, and to replace it with rational love that sets my child free to grow into herself, and into her life. (And, can I just say, thank GOODNESS for Baby Nurofen!)

Jacky D Ice-Cream!!

Tjoep-stil in her car seat next me (she fell asleep taking her papa to work), I am trying to get in as many words as I can before duty calls. (And believe you me, 'duty' is very vocal and shockingly eloquent for someone who can only say mama, woof, miaow and moo!) Craig's on a school trip for the next couple of days in some unnamed forest past Leicester - so while the mouse is away, the cat will play! lol! Having the car and all its exquisite freedoms means that during the day Layla and I can jol to our heart's content - and in the evening, I've got quiet little dinner parties planned. (Truth be told, I'm just exaggerating. There's nothing at all glam about the simple suppers I've organised, seeing as it's the end of an unusually frugal month - but the company will certainly be juicy! Wendy, Dinee and Adam: I'm talkin' about YOU! *wink*)

Somehow, my circumstances have always dictated that I be an absolute queen of the quandary: i.e. how can I turn my apparently half-empty cup into, not sommer a half-full cup, but one which overflows in magical, beautiful abundance? My example for today is the fact that my larder is all but bare - and I simply cannot journey through the night with my friends without the perfect ending of a fabulous pudding! So, lying far too wide awake for the hour last night thanks to the first cup of caffeinated coffee I've had in more than two years, I conjured up what I hope will be a concoction I can keep for the recipe book I'm writing. Right - here's how I'm going to make it:

1. In my pretty-pretty pink porcelain (1920s) bowl, I'll dribble a deep swig or two of Jack Daniels - and into it I'll add a generous handful of raisins and honey. (I'm not much of a believer in precise measurements of any kind, so play around with the amounts according to your specific predilection: i.e. boozy, fruity or super-duper sweet.) Allow the raisins to soak all day long... all the flavours mingling into a new deliciousness you've never tasted before.
2. Soften what's left of the vanilla ice-cream by leaving it to defrost a little without being tempted to eat any of it. (Okay, maybe just two wee spoonfuls?)
3. Fold the raisins and the whiskey/honey into the softened ice-cream. Return to the freezer until as soon as possible after dinner. (I have never been able to wait very long for dessert...)

Still in my cozy jarmies after yesterday's London adventure, I'm going to skip all the housework and other mundanities in favour of following up on the exciting contacts I made yesterday and, sjoe, getting as much writing done as I can! Sooooo many stories to tell...........................

A Lighter Shade of Pale {green...}

[This post originated at iMod.]

Trying to live in this murky limbo of packing up means that my house feels like just that: a house. A topsy-turvy shell which feels empty - bereft of the care and attention to detail that is my signature (and somewhat bohemian) style. Ag ja - 'bohemian' is such a cliche these days, but it perfectly defines everything about me with its connotations of nomadic romance... And actually, I'm going to ditch the original thing I was going to write about, and tell you instead about how I have come to find myself in all the colours of the rainbow where I once lost who I was in a depthless pool of black.

I hardly ever talk about it now, but like a jagged, keloided-over scar the remaining evidence of a previous violence, I was married before. Yip, I'm a remarried divorcee. My ex-husband has also recently remarried - but that, my friends, is another story I'll have to leave for another day... Anyway, before my 15 year old self met him, my personal style was already um, rather quirky. My mom indulged me endlessly, sewing up all my own sketched designs with that particular brand of joy that only mommies can feel as they watch their daughters becoming young women. One of these dresses, which so reflected my undying passion for the 1960s and '70s, was a black ankle-length, empire-line maxi-dress - with wide bell sleeves, all trimmed with flowery braid chosen from my mom's stash of vintage ribbons I could spend hours rummaging through - brain amok with fashion fantasies! (Don't even get me started on her chocolate box of sequins and beads... Ooh la la!) If only I could remember what shoes I wore with this dress... Another outfit combination I wore with happily rebellious pride and which made my poor dad visibly cringe when I was with him in public, was my knee-length floral skirt in a reddish granny print chiffon (also devotedly made by my mom as per my instructions), worn with a t-shirt, a cream cardigan I was very sentimentally attached to and which I tied round my hips thereby ruining it into overstretched oblivion forever, and on my feet: my mom's hyper-chunky, heavy-as-hell Italian hiking boots. (This was before I was bought those iconically grunge/punk boots: Doc Martens!) And then, ahem, there is the matter of my hair. My sweet mama let me dye it a ludicrously cheap red tinge - which I just loved for how it made me feel (no matter that it was completely the wrong tone for my skin!) Of course, let me not forget my ultimate style accessory I have never been able to live without since I was eleven: lip-gloss. Due to an unexplainable addiction and the fact that I lick my lips perpetually, especially when concentrating, I make VERY sure I have a variety of tubes in my immediate vicinity at all times: whether it's paddling down the Orange River, writing a particularly strenuous exam essay, or - more recently - giving birth! (While I was changing Layla's nappy this morning, I noticed her carefully watching me while she licked her lips back and forth -- and I realised she was copying me! Noooooo!!! Is my child doomed to inherit my lip issues?!)

So before I met The Ex, I was radically exuberant in how I chose to express myself through colour and style. My Ex, however, came from a creepily conservative Rondebosch family, and I found myself toning things down by self-conscious degrees, so that by the end of the second year, I was a boring clone of all that is mediocre and 'normal'. A couple of years later, and I was suddenly swathed in black, black and more black. My excuse was that it fit my art student persona and my budget: i.e. everything matched! But looking back, I can see I'd lost the ability to be myself, and I was drowning, slowly and somehow defiantly, in this relationship - and black was the colour of my heart then: I couldn't see the light I craved through this pressing, suffocating thing I believed was love.
Here is another story about the way in which colour can so magically diagnose maladies of the heart. My sister, Mandy, had a particularly unique and vivacious relationship with colour - and bucked the trend, as she continues to do now, by replacing the predictable norm of blue skies, yellow sun and green grass with audacious choices of orange, purple and zingy pink! Until... she, out of the blue, replaced it all with harsh scribblings of black. Alarm bells rang for my mom who dashed off to the school to investigate. Turns out the teacher was exasperatedly trying to teach this left-handed child to be right-handed -- by smacking her errant left hand with a ruler!

My wearing black as a young woman continued unabated, broken only by the odd colourful garment. Even my paintings became drained of colour, and I chose only to work in graphite, black and shades of sepia. Even until about two years ago. One of the most notable things about colour choice, in my wardrobe and art, was that I never, ever used green. It was only once I managed to leave The Ex and return to Cape Town, that I suddenly started to add green to my life: from the sophisticatedly sombre tones of olive all the way through to the most fanatical of lime! I'd always been extremely aware of the fact that I'd never been a 'green' fan - but never quite grasped why... until I began incorporating it into my personal pallette. At the time, I was working (and playing!) as the art director for a nationwide fashion house and, in my trendforecasting analysis, discovered this intriguing snippet of enlightening info: people haunted by depression exclude the use of green in their personal expression, be it art, interiors or fashion. Wow! (to say the least.) It all made so much sense in retrospect, didn't it?

Needless to say, every inconceivable shade of green can be spotted in my life now - and that says a lot, hey? (*wink*)