Now we are two...

As some of you will know The Ginger Prince turned two a week ago and is now officially a big boy. It isn’t easy to plan a treat for a boy who’s days normally include trips to the beach, sightings of Sea Lions and outings to City Farms but I thought one thing we didn’t do every day was visit the penguin colony at Boulder’s beach. AA’s students were traumatising over their statistics too much for him to take a day off so it was just me and a Ginger Prince who had already worked himself into a lather of birthday excitement before he had even got out of his pyjamas. We took a 25 minute drive down the coast through St James, Fish Hoek, Kalk Bay and the lovely Simon’s Town to Boulder’s beach with TGP in the back adding the sound effects of ‘’Choo choo’’ and ‘’Arf arf’’ in places where he had previously seen both trains and Sea Lions.

                At Seaforth, the beach next to boulders from which you walk, our parking attendant guided us to a penguin nursing a chick in a tiny space under a shed in the car park. We peered for as long as we could until the mother started angling her head and launching her beak out as though planning to give TGP’s enquiring little fingers a peck. Penguins look adorable from a distance but up close they have little beady eyes and smell strongly of fish.

Seaforth Beach is ideal for toddlers because of the natural rock pools that form at the base of the boulders. It was into just such a rock pool that I lowered a naked and wriggling Ginger Prince and it was there that he remained, splashing and shouting at sea gulls, until I spotted two penguins hopping off  another Boulder and chased them with my camera, leaving TGP to beetle along after me. Drying a sandy, wet Ginger Prince is no easy matter when at any given opportunity he will wriggle free and roll once again along the beach creating a cement-like paste of sun cream, salt and sand. Once decent I took him through the walkway that looks down on Boulder’s Beach itself, where the colony of endangered African Penguins have chosen to make their nests for decades. It is consistently strange to see a Penguin in a sea that is warm enough to swim in and especially when they are there in such vast numbers and tame enough to come right over to the barriers. TGP almost took off in excitement and even made an attempt to get through the barrier which was unsuccessful, fortunately for the penguins.

As soon as AA got home TGP opened his presents which included some exciting items from friends and relatives back home and from myself and AA a red sports car with opening doors (very manly) and a pink pram (not so very manly). His face lit up when he opened the latter, as I knew it would having seen him make a beeline for them wherever possible, and he proceeded to fill it with dinosaurs and toy trains and rabbits and then clatter manically around the living room laughing.

Ordinarily TGP will eat anything with sugar in but even he made an exception for the birthday cake I made him. It was the second cake I have made as an adult and definitely the least successful. I somehow failed to patch together the right ingredients for my recipe and then thought at the last minute I could ad-lib. Turns out ad-libbing doesn’t work so well when it comes to baking and it seems me and Google mean different things when we say ‘’Easy’’. AA tried to force it down because he felt bad for me but even he has now given up.

Muizenberg

This is our second week living in Muizenberg’s Heritage Quarter. Although Muizenberg is classed as a coastal suburb of Cape Town it is very much a village from the inside; a village with a distinctive hippy/surfy feel.

 No sooner had we moved in than TGP put his ginger head as far through our next door neighbour’s fence as it would go in order to better view their two sausage dog and repeatedly shouted ‘’Wah-Wah- WAH-WAH!!’’ as the owners tried to enjoy their morning coffee in the sunshine, intending to kindly inform them that they had a dog.  We have further ingratiated ourselves with said neighbours by setting the house alarm off twice, once being at 7.00am on a Sunday morning. 

100 years ago this Heritage Quarter of Muizenberg was a thriving holiday destination for the rich and famous, including Agatha Christie and Rudyard Kipling until it plunged into some serious disrepair and was plagued by crime for decades. Residents have fairly recently set up the Muizenberg Improvement District initiative which, amongst many other things, taxes all the homeowners and with the money pays a private security firm (GRIT) to keep an eye out, provide a regular patrol and question anyone behaving questionably. This patrol, alongside the fact that neighbours live on top of each other here, allow more open living than in other parts of Cape Town to continue, with open fronted houses, on-Street parking and no security gates. GRIT are no neighbourhood watch. They drive a camouflage truck, talk constantly on walkie talkies and remind me slightly of the A-Team. TGP has made them the unlikely targets of his unrelenting friendship and whenever he sees them patrolling in their uniform shouts ‘’HIYA- HIYA!!!’’  and waves frantically, leaving them in the quandary of either deliberately ignoring a child or looking very un-SAS and stopping their patrol to admire whatever stuffed toy he wants to show them. I’m pleased to say they usually do the latter.

Last Friday we went to the weekly Muizenberg Night Market, held in the kitsch, fifties style Blue Bird Garage down the road. The ambience and food was amazing, even though I got so overwhelmed with food-stall blindness that I ended up mistakenly queuing for 40 minutes to buy a tofu stir fry from a surly Belgian in a pork-pie hat. Everything at the market was hand made and I bought TGP a pack of farm animal shaped short bread to compensate for the head coming off his very cheap toy horse, leaving him holding its decapitated body and crying into its neck.  My treat backfired when he tried to regurgitate the shortbread duck, thinking it was a real duck, pointing at his mouth and saying ‘’Quack, quack! Quack, quack!’’ in a horrified voice. It made me dread the day he finds out the horrible truth about his favourite food, wafer-thin ham.

The Ginger Prince loves the beach almost as much as he loves ham. I regularly release him onto the huge open space where he runs about mostly naked and gets so coated in sand that it can be found in his ears the following morning. When we get home I have to dangle him by one arm into the backyard and hose him down before he can be allowed into the house. He maintains a healthy respect for (or fear of) the ocean and no amount of coaxing will get him into the endless waves in Muizenberg. There is, however, a walkway that leads to St James beach where there is a tidal pool and rocks that provide a wave break. He is happy to be planted in these rock pools, amongst the huge sea anemones (and occasional jelly fish), for hours- in just a hat and sun block.

Our new house is lovely and it is the first time in TGP's short life that he has ever lived in a place with stairs. Halfway up our stairs a huge window looks out onto the side of Table Mountain and I have swapped the spotting of Phantom Quaggas for the spotting of Phantom Babboons which are more plentiful here. I did eventually see the Quaggas from our previous balcony so I hold out some hope for the Babboons. TGP doesn’t know about the Babboons but whenever I try to steer him downstairs he plants himself on a step and stares out of the window in the hope of a cat, the train into Cape Town that takes AA to work, or even a helicopter.

We have only lived here for two weeks but in that time I have noticed the following 10 things;

1)     There is never a time through the day that someone cannot be seen scuttling around a corner in a wetsuit with a surf board under their arm.

2)     If you hear a low siren from the beach a shark has been spotted (three times since we have been here) and the very hardcore surfers still ignore it and stay in the water.

3)     It seems completely acceptable to rent a shop, fill it with hand made goods, make it look amazing and inviting and then open for about four hours a day, three days a week, not including weekends, and somehow still stay afloat.

4)     Church is a big, big thing here and absolutely everything shuts on a Sunday.

5)     You need to put many, many coals on a Braai in order for it to actually cook your dinner.

6)     You shouldn’t feed baboons; it makes them attack humans which will eventually lead to their being shot (I haven’t done this, just been sufficiently leafletted about it and a much loved Baboon recently met this fate, to local uproar) .

7)     The multi-coloured beach huts which provide Muizenberg’s trademark image (below) are municipal, open and free for anyone to use.

8)     It was a big mistake to get all our books shipped from the UK because they are now a tower of boxes in the front room.

9)     The teeny tiny local pizzeria with about four tables shows classic movies every Sunday night.

10) I like it here.