Monday
It’s 3.30 pm on a Monday half way through my birthday month and today winter has made a grand entrance. I’m sitting in the kitchen, with the lamp on because it’s so dark, and through the window I can see my first waterfall of the season on Devil’s Peak. It’s been pelting down. I am making a small leek and potato soup. I decided to make it small, because yesterday I made our favourite baby roasties thinking there’d be leftovers for at least two days, but then I ate them all. All the baby roastie potatoes. By myself. And it seemed so easy, I wondered how a bag of them usually stretched to four of us. And it’s not like that’s all I made. There were veggies too. It did take me several hours to work through the ‘leftovers’, but still: 700 grams of potatoes, on one day, all by myself. I don’t even know what to think about that.
That’s why I am making a small pot of soup. I can’t be trusted around potatoes.
While I was chopping the leeks, I listened to a poem called ‘Little Children’ by Caroline Bird on a podcast called Poetry Unbound. Pádraig Ó Tuama is an openly queer, married, Irish Catholic priest. (I wonder whether anyone, at the turn of this century, would have thought that putting all those adjectives before ‘Catholic priest’ would ever be possible.) The way he reads is wonderful, and the way he discusses poems is not at all academic. Also, the poems are well-chosen: unusual, modern, irreverent (but also often reverent) and from a really vast selection of writers of all shapes and sizes from all over the world.
‘Little Children’ is a funny poem, with a clever flip around halfway so you’re not sure whether the poet is criticising her own children or herself where she was young. She says children are disapproving, hypocritical, Victorian moralists incapable of understanding nuance. Luckily you and Ollie did not inflict as much childish righteousness on me as the little bishops of this poem, but I laughed at the line ‘Imagine bellowing criticism from the stalls after seeing two minutes of a play!’ I’ll tell you why it made me laugh, because I don’t think you’ll remember this.
When you were around four or five, this show called Stomp came to Cape Town. Its dancers beat out rhythms using their boots and a variety of every day tools like brooms, matchboxes and dustbin lids, and now and again they vocalise, but never sing. I loved that show so much. One of the pieces was of them sweeping. First one, then another dancer, then another and so on joined and altered the sound, until it developed into a rackety beat that cohered into a fulsome, multi-stranded beast. It is mesmerising, joyous and almost narcotic.
A while later, after a few other sets, the brooms came on again and you – who were a quiet and watchful child, rather than someone with loud opinions – piped into the expectant stillness of the theatre, in an exasperated and very loud voice, ‘Not the brooms again!’
Bellowing criticism from the stalls.
It’s really raining hard now. I hope the Eastern Cape is getting some of this. I was there last week. I hardly know the neighbouring province and I realised that I was full of pre-conceived ideas about it. I’ve always known that it is a beautiful place, but only in theory because I’ve seldom been there, and so many of my very good friends come from there, but it has also always seemed blighted. It’s one of the provinces that has really suffered most dismally under bad governance – since even before this government took over in ’94 – and in recent years, I think of it as a place that condemns the old, the sick and children to limbo. It is also constantly struggling with electricity and water issues , and now it’s been in drought for years. All of these things, on top of plain, straightforward ignorance, made me dismiss it as a non-place – a vacuum on the map. I understand how arrogant that is, but I think we probably all have dark spots on the maps in our minds, while other spots sparkle enticingly.
I was put to rights though.
I flew into Gqeberha last Monday, where I and a few others piled into a mini-van. I sat in the back in the middle and watched the road north roll up under our wheels. The windows were down and the air smelled different. We tracked the border of the Addo Elephant Park (it is huge!) as we tugged the other end of the N10 closer. The countryside was pillowy and undulating and hardly disturbed by concrete monstrosities. In the car were people I didn’t yet know I would like. Mia on my right. Elodi on my left. In front, Emma, almost eighty, from The Netherlands. Between the four of us and the driver, we covered five decades in ages, with a big skip between me – the oldest of the youngest – and Emma.
We drove just over two hours to Somerset East. The air, outside the car, was decidedly different to Cape Town but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Something organic. Something warm and earthy. It took a while to work out that I was smelling cow poo. But it was nice! You walk past these huge greenish black turd piles, that look quite a lot like fancy cake, all over the roads and pavements. It smells much better than the dog and human poo that scent our city. I looked at one of the big grass cakes and remember Ouma telling me that in winter, they would stand in the cow dung along the roads so that they could warm their bare feet. That sounds like bullshit, right? I better check it with her.
At the guesthouse in Somerset East, the host was explaining the keys and the remote for the sliding gate. She told me to make sure the gate was closed before I left. ‘You’ll be surprised at how fast a cow or a sheep can get in. We even had a pig once.’ For a second or two, I didn’t know what she was saying. They were all foreign words. Then, when I realised she was speaking about animals, not security issues, I was so caught up in the peculiarity of the problem of free-ranging livestock, that I forgot to listen to the rest of her instructions, and it was quite a fiddle when I returned from dinner late that night in the dark. I made sure the gate was closed though.
I went there to spend a few days with writers who’d been selected to take part in a month-long residency at the Jakes Gerwel Foundation. Apart from the people I was in the car with, there was also a tall man called Loit from Riversdal and a writer I’ve had contact with on social media but have never met, Mpush.
Meeting Mpush was like meeting an old friend. I know many people read a lot, but it feels like our reading rates are well matched (though I think he reads more than I do) and we’ve read so many of the same books. Conversation between us felt easy and familiar from the get-go.
Each night, we sat around a large table, a fire in the grate, a large sketch of the inimitable Jakes Gerwel watching over us, and ate delicious dinners made by the resident chef, Gilbert. The first night, there was steak and vegetables on a cloud of mash potatoes. (Potatoes!) I was very hungry, because I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I ate the whole steak, which is more meat than I’ve eaten in about a year, and – true to form – all the potatoes. And the veggies. By the time we had lunch the next day, I was still full from the night before. After supper, Loit played his guitar and sang. Emma recited some of her poems in Dutch.
After a day or two, the stories began to flow. On one evening, just as everyone sat down, there was this curious, awkward silence. I thought Theo – the host from the foundation – was about to pray and I said so and we all laughed and then started talking about prayer and how – for most of us, regardless of our spiritual convictions, if they exist at all – a prayer before a meal made sense. The next thing – and it was a wonderful, spontaneous next thing – we all held hands and each person said the prayer they knew.
Jules, Child, I know no prayer for food! So I just said I was grateful for good food and good people to share it with. Everyone else produced their prayers like all the familiar rattlings of gratitude I’ve known over the years at others’ tables.
I tried to look up my Oupa’s mutterings when I got home, but I can’t find words that match. Sometimes I despair of my culturelessness.
I am prayerless, but not ungrateful. Whenever I bite into a December peach, prayer happens accidentally. I remember one day being so overcome by the taste of a peach that I was trying to say something to Sam about it and I welled up. Imagine crying over a peach! Salty prayers.
On one of the days last week, we were driven up a mountain as far as the wildly bumpy road could take us, then we walked deep into a kloof. The sky was that blue that looks like its made out of cheap plastic, and the cliffs’ steep orange walls towered upwards like scenes from Dune shot in the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan. On the other side of those mountains, in the Karoo, the drought has sucked everything dry, but in the kloof it was soft and the air was moist and the light was benign.
Pelargonium and ferns and fantastic draperies of grenth (made up word for general greenness) burst and puffed and poured out of rocks we walked beside. There were ostentatious spiderwebs that spread up to a meter at a time in every possible direction, where enormous golden orb spiders lummed in their shimmery castles. The man who took us there called the road ‘the tunnel of horrors’. He wasn’t the only one who hated spiders – there was a lot of stick-waving and hand-flapping going on. I thought of you. You would also have been doing the spider dance if you were there. Or maybe you would have just turned around and sat at the bakkie until we all returned.
The golden orb spiders are fine: big, fat and chilled, and totally out of the closet about their spiderness. I, who prefer things with many legs to things with no legs, don’t mind spiders, generally, but then Alan told us to watch out for violin spiders: small little poison grenades lurking under leaves and rocks. And they were everywhere! There was a lot of peering going on before moves were made across rocks and through narrow traverses. Violin spiders are not fun. I knew a woman once who had been a Miss South Africa who was bitten on her face by one. She was deeply traumatised by the wound and the scarring. I only mention her title because it also severely affected her work for many years after the bite. (Don’t be tempted to google pictures of the bite.)
The trail wound along a river, under an ancient kiepersol with its fingery fronds reaching up towards the sky, and passed an 800-year-old yellow stinkwood. Emma, 720 years younger than that tree, trekked along like a trooper.
Then we got to the waterfall. It’s a kilometre high, and it spews forcefully and far over the edge of the mountain, dropping into a wide, clean pool at the bottom of a kind of upside-down cliff amphitheatre.
Everyone was quiet. The sound of the waterfall was unstoppable thunder. The words that came into my head were “gracious God”.
Not like an exclamation. More like a prayer.
I try hard to un-word myself in nature. Words can be such an unwelcome intrusion and the appearance of them at that moment forced me to wonder whether I was having a religious moment, and then puzzle over and analyse that. It took me out of the moment and away from where I was, and I had to wade back in forcefully against my monkey mind.
There are no words for times like those. Sometimes they diminish and reduce.
I forgot to mention the black eagle that soared over us all the way. Wingspan of two metres. That’s Ollie and Sam and James-sized. Just swirling casual and light as a dandelion seed in the air.
I fell in the river walking back. Soaked up to under my boobs in ice water. Maybe I was baptising myself. That was the day of the night when we prayed.
I’m pausing now for leek and potato soup. It’s still thundering down out there.
Tuesday
I spent the morning doing a second sweep of a manuscript for which the editing has to be done by Friday. I spent a lot of that time clenching and unclenching my jaw. The writer is one of those people who believes that their intellect is superior to everyone else’s. Almost without fail, every text query I had was answered with irritation or snideness or the kind of explanation that is offered in order to convey that one’s question is a stupid one. If a question required a yes or no, the writer opted first for a little lecture before answering.
I really hope I never become the kind of person who believes that they have nothing to learn from anyone else.
I also sincerely hope that I never become the kind of person who always responds first with rudeness, disdain or meanness when they are questioned about anything.
The good news is that, layered over my habitual first reaction to people being rude to me (ie: I must be, or have done something, stupid), and my second reaction (being cross because they’re rude), is a new feeling: I pity them. I find them pathetic, actually. People who are unable to see past their own egos are pitiable and pathetic because they have no way to see how ridiculous they are. All we can do is feel sorry for them.
But let’s leave Pompous Fart there.
I met Ollie at Gardens’ Centre for coffee. He is currently in possession of a happy-sad heart, but that’s a story for him to tell you. He came here after and had some of the leftover soup and some sourdough bread, and then we watched Douglas, the second show Hannah Gadsby did. Turns out he’s seen it, and it was the first one he hadn’t seen, but it was a pleasant and unexpected way to spend the afternoon. He’s taking me to the airport on Sunday, and then he leaves on Monday.
It has just occurred to me that on Monday next week, our little family of four will be scatterlings, each of us away from home base, and off the continent. Sam only gets back from Tel Aviv the day after I leave.
GREECE, BABY!
It feels strange to say ‘I’m going to Greece,’ because, as I said to Mia and Elodi in the car on the way to Somerset East, ‘I’m not the kind of person who goes to Greece.’
I would never allow myself such an indulgence (People are starving! Environmental footprint! Irresponsible use of money when you are a freelancer!). I’m partly terrified and partly so excited that my clothes have been packed for a week.
Six more sleeps, then we’ll see one another.
Unclench, I keep instructing myself every time I think about the money. Unclench! Because since the divorce, I’m all about the clench. This is not a healthy way to be. Prudent is good. White-knuckle grasping while hyperventilating is bad.
As Mia said, when she hugged me goodbye on Friday when I left to drive back to the airport, ‘Be the kind of person who goes to Greece.’
See you in Athens!
Love,
Kowsk.
PS: Terrible month for absorbing media. Not sure why. I think it has to do with the fact that I read my first satisfying novel in a very long time (The Potter’s Hand, by AN Wilson). I watched a short Korean film called Georgia on the New Yorker website. It was very affecting. Read the story that gave rise to the film if you decide to watch it. I watched, as you know, Be Sweet, Pray and Obey. I think my mouth hung open often – how little it takes to wield power over people. And I watched Anatomy of a Scandal, which I thought was nuanced on the topic of consent. I loved the visual metaphors in the architecture. Some of the performances were a bit wooden though. Can’t wait to discuss this one with you.
I was completely useless with music. I listened to half of the new Post Malone album. Meh. Not because the music is meh, but because it was a bit too pop-y for me. Also listened to Florence & The Machine’s new album, and watched the video of her song Free, which features the actor Bill Nighy, as her bothersome internal worrier. Can you choose the song you want to add to this month’s playlist from these three: Free by Flo, Gap Year by Twin Tooth or Bobby Reid by Lucette? Dankie, Skaapie.