Scans and broken legs

We returned to South Africa two days ago to be greeted by a humpback whale in Muizenberg bay and a selection of curious baboons whilst walking in Tokai.  Our three week tour of the UK took in Edinburgh, Manchester, London and Oxfordshire where we visited cousins, aunts, friends, parents and new babies. Busy, but good.

 No sooner had we come blinking and red eyed into Heathrow after a sleepless night-flight than the rioters spread their unseemly way through the majority of the cities we planned to visit. But neither the looting nor the rain detracted from how good it feels to be home after a long time, to see friends and family, and to have that mixture of familiarity and novelty at once again seeing swans and green parks and tasting the tepid meat of a Gregg’s pasty. The novelty part, however, was short lived and after about a day it felt like we had never left.  

TGP was delighted to be fussed and petted from all sides and squealed at cows and sheep as we drove through the countryside, having presumably forgotten such things existed.   Around six weeks ago he broke his leg by standing on an innocent looking toy car in our front room that zipped away from under him, and he had to all but learn to walk again during our UK visit, happily limping from house to house and soaking up attention as he went. I must say though that considering how many different places we stayed he behaved very well, which is fortunate for me as I have discovered that it is hard to discipline a child who is limping without looking and feeling entirely evil. For three weeks TGP wore an immobilising full-leg cast, which was horrific for all. After much red tape our medical insurance company (Discovery Healthcare) decided not to pay for the treatment as they said that the Emergency Room in a hospital is not part of the hospital itself.  Be thankful that you have not had to listen to the full version of that rant as many times as TGP or AA, but also please be thankful for free healthcare.

Starting with Edinburgh, in the full soggy throws of the festival, we worked our way down to London and back up again. The further South we got the younger the children TGP met, and therefore the gentler he was instructed to be. There were cousins between the ages of three months and nineteen years, second and first, ginger and otherwise, new and otherwise, finally culminating with a boxer dog on the way up through Manchester again. With relief TGP curled up on the rug next to the (jowly and unimpressed) boxer dog whilst he kept a safe distance from the smaller of the babies muttering ‘’Gentle, gentle” to himself under his breath, as a personal reminder. One night I even heard him telling himself to be gentle in his sleep. All good practice since, as some of you already know, he is to become a big brother next year.

So I can now reveal that whilst TGP was bum-sliding across the floor in his cast his Mummy was puking. And then puking some more. Many of you have already heard in vivid detail about how bad the puking has been this time around and those even less fortunate have actually seen it (Strangers have also seen it; the revellers of the Edinburgh festival, the residents of Muizenberg). So if you haven’t heard from me for a while it is because TGP was immobile, I was medicating my way through almost three months of self-pity and AA was in denial about the whole thing. Ordinarily it is harder for fathers to be in denial the second time around but AA seems to be pulling it off. To be fair TGP and I cannot have been the greatest company lately.

Tempting as it is I won’t say “that’s the hard part done” (because all the mothers reading this will snigger) but at 16 weeks I can tentatively say that the puking seems to have stopped, just as the bump is beginning to show, and things are looking a whole lot rosier. As I ease into the second trimester, and bigger clothes, AA can emerge from denial and we can all start to feel properly excited about the little mite due to be born on the 22^nd of Feb next year, a leap year incidentally. In the meantime we still need to find somewhere for us all to live when we leave this place in December and hopefully find a replacement for Dr Sinister, my current Gyny/Obstetrician, who I foolishly opted for without a recommendation. He ‘up-sells’ scans (sometimes as little as two weeks apart) and tells me horrific stories about his other patients.

We will also be finding out if it is to be a boy or girl at 20 weeks this time around, an option that wasn’t available with my first pregnancy.  In spite of my 100% failure rate at gender guessing (having been fairly sure that TGP was to be female) I have a feeling that this time I am carrying a girl. If I’m right  I have all the left over girls names from the first time around, and if I’m wrong I have all the left over clothes, so either way it’s all good.

Shoebills and Sculptures

I’m not blaming him but since The Ginger Prince turned two the weather has taken a little turn for the nasty, just as news of the heat wave in the UK drifted across the Ocean. There are still plenty of bright, clear days but when it does rain here it does it properly, in sheets and for days at a time, rendering most of our usual activities impossible. And because the houses here are built with no central heating and thick walls to keep cool in summer the nights and evenings can get pretty cold. I remember happily throwing away my hot water bottle in Scotland, never imagining for a minute that four months later I would be scouring shopping malls in South Africa for one.

For entertainment through the winter months The Ginger Prince and I decided to arrange classes for ourselves. Since websites for businesses do not come as standard here if you want to find something you have to dig around for it in shop windows, local magazines and libraries rather than just pump it into Google. Eventually I found a Tuesday and Thursday morning Playgroup around the corner for TGP and a Wednesday night sculpture class in Constantia for me.  TGP showed no resistance to trotting through the gates dragging his bag behind him into three hours of painting leaves, trampolining (sometimes naked) and generally behaving far better than he would ever do at home. Before snack-time, these two and three year olds have to sit still at table and then say grace before receiving their peanut butter on toast. Too much wildness will result in having to sit with their hands on their heads. Since TGP can’t really talk and almost never sits still I was amazed at what a brave attempt he made.

My sculpture class comprises of around five women who are guided through their individual projects in a converted garage/ workshop within the large garden of a local sculptor. Clay, firing facilities, music and red wine are all provided whilst eccentricity, imagination and plain speaking are encouraged. The first person I spoke to had brought her pet cockatiel with her and throughout the two hours we sculpted she told the story of how she had cried all weekend because this pet bird had barely survived a hawk attack. This sparked a strange and circular conversation about whether or not it is cannibalism for one bird to eat another bird and how (from the strident vegetarian) it was actually cannibalism for any of us to eat meat at all, and at least a hawk wouldn’t know any better. Perhaps a good time for everyone to sit with their hands on their heads and wait in silence. The teacher, floating amongst us and giving very good and constructive sculpting advice, mentioned in passing that she had a ‘’zapper’’ for when hawks tried to take her pet ducks. I was interested to know what a ‘zapper’ actually was but I didn’t like to ask, nor did I like to mention that AA works in birds of prey conservation. Instead, to change the subject, I asked the vegetarian, sitting opposite me and meticulously coiling and shaping a beautiful large nude, and the woman next to her, making Christmas Decorations, if they were both from Cape Town. The vegetarian was from Jo-burg, the other one from Cape Town. And the vegetarian told me with a shake of the head ‘’And Cape Town is sooo backward...’’ a comment which the other woman did not appreciate and she laid her Christmas Decorations to one side and loudly defended her home town before being told by the first woman to be ‘’careful not to get her blood pressure up’’.  This kind of entertainment, set to music with red wine and endless amounts of clay to get stuck into was perfect for me and I’m looking forward to going back for more.

AA has just returned from a week long work trip in which he descended on the Benguala Swamp in Zambia in a four passenger light air craft and stayed in a luxury tented lodge from which he could travel by river boat to bother Shoebills, 5ft tall birds with massive beaks who eat snakes and catfish, in one of the most remote parts of the world. With no electricity or phone signal in AAs tent we didn’t speak until he got back, like in the old days. Meanwhile at home I hosted my first ‘’bring and Braii’’, where people come round to your house with their own food and you BBQ it for them, officially the easiest way to entertain. Especially as I wasn’t even really in charge of the BBQ. Everything went fine until two friends discovered their car had been stolen from just outside our house. I drove them to the Local Police Station in which TGP happily made friends with the prisoners who were brought in.

Due to events on the other side of the world I have just become an Aunite again, and TGP a cousin. Nothing will make you feel further away from home than a birth in the family but for the moment I will have to just look forward to August when I'm back, and make do with Skype till then.
                            

                                                                

                                                                    Benguala Swamp

                                                                      Shoebill Laughing

                                                                Shoebill not laughing              

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.

           

Lost and Found

This week I lost a bracelet that AA bought me when we first arrived and that I was very attached to. On Tuesday, in an attempt to retrace my steps and find it, I walked back to Oude Molen eco village café to search where I had been sitting the day before. Just before the cafe I saw that someone in the Eco Village had flung all their belongings outside their house (which was actually more like a long barn) along with a hand painted sign saying ‘’Brik ‘n’ Brak’’. I cannot resist impromptu stalls and it was almost as if they had set a trap specifically for me. I steered The Ginger Prince in and rifled through all the items. I was more excited than TGP who thought we were going to see some horses and then had somehow ended up shopping. He kept looking up at me saying ‘’Neigh? Neigh?’’, but I pretended I didn’t know what he meant.

The mild mannered and eccentric father and son team who were selling up convinced me that they were African Art connoisseurs  and kept throwing things into the conversation like ‘’this used to hang in my gallery in town’’ and ‘’this is a very special piece’’. The prices varied hugely and it was a little like a mini-Ikea (complete with corrugated roof) in that you convinced yourself that because the little vases and things were a real bargain everything else was as well. I bought one small thing and carried on to the café (and the Neighs) where I looked for my bracelet with no success. As I sat drinking my coffee I thought about the great big African mask that had dominated a whole corner of the house sale and that I had dismissed as too expensive for brik ‘n’ brak. When I eventually winkled TGP away from the pigs and horses and dogs I went back for another look.

 There she was sitting on a chair in the corner, as huge, dramatic and unexpected as the first time. The son hopped over on his crutches and brought her out to show me. Having had the experience many times before (notably in Marrakesh) of buying some artefact that looses all its other-worldy charm the minute you get it home I was a little cautious. But it was just so hard to resist the idea that I had come by something so unusual in such an unlikely setting, it seemed almost like destiny. The father then came over telling me a story about where it came from (which I have now mostly forgotten) and both father and son insisted together that I had a real eye for African Masks and African Art in general ‘’Really?’’ I said ‘’ I don’t think I do, do you think so? I don’t know anything about this type of thing!’’. ‘’Yes’’ they agreed ‘’you definitely have an eye’’. And the more they said it the more of their things I picked up to buy.

Still unsure about the mask I called AA at work and there followed a miscommunication about the price (that he still thinks was deliberate) and he thought I was quoting him Rand rather than Pounds and so thought it cost £12.50 rather than £120. This type of thing happens a lot. ‘’Definitely’’ he said ‘’Go for it, if you like it’’ so I gave them £100 for it and picked up a couple of other little nik naks on the way. Father and son loved me so, so much. The son took me through to the back of their house/ shop/ barn to show me some of his more expensive pieces during which I also met his mother who was lying on a day bed waving away flies and watching television amongst an endless array of paintings and wall hangings. He then looked out the phone number of a real-estate friend of his in case I ever wanted to buy a house, obviously wanting to share my gullible nature about. Meanwhile the father plunged the enormous mask into a plastic bag (which detracted from its charm a little) along with my other purchases and I hung them all off the back of the buggy and clattered off on the 45 minute walk home completely weighed down by things I didn’t need.

Arriving home I arranged the mask beautifully on our formica dressing table, where she looked even more imposing (and possibly ridiculous) all the while convincing myself that AA would be smitten when he got home from work. And he was certainly shocked, particularly after the £100/£10 issue was cleared up. AA claims not to be superstitious at all but I think he found her presence in our home a bit unnerving and he wrestled her carefully into a cupboard ‘’for the time being’’. He was, all the while, making an effort not to touch her too much as he said it gave him Anthrax just looking at her since the back of her head is made of soft, very old, leather.

 She is an original South African Ceremonial Mask  and I have taken a photo of myself wearing it, just for effect (see photo below). I will never, never, ever be putting her on again as it was heavy and felt wrong. One day, when no longer living in rented accommodation and when we have a wall big enough to show her off (possibly not our little flat in Edinburgh), we will be mounting her on a stand and there she will stay and when we die she can be the thing that our offspring (TGP) can dread inheriting. I always wanted one of those things.

Pesky Paperwork and a New Home

Today it is 35 degrees, and officially too damn hot for ginger babies (and their mothers). Those who can have headed for the beach but we are again in car limbo, waiting on the car we have just bought, a very sensible Automatic Toyota, bought in pounds from a fellow Brit moving home.

     Stripping our direct debits back to the very, very bare minimum before we left was liberating but we are now in the process of slowly building them back up again over here. £175 a month insurance for hospital visits only will certainly make you appreciate the NHS. If we need to see a specialist or a GP outside of hospital we will still have to pay for it. Nor is banking free here. Our basic account is £10 per month, with a limit on transactions, so instead of paying for most things on card we get large sums of cash out of the bank. Council tax and utilities, however, are so little you don’t even notice them so I suppose it will all even out. 
We are also waiting to move into the rental house we have chosen. The house may not be as sensible as the car, but it has a whole lot more character. It is five minutes from the beach in the leafy and colonial heritage quarter of Muizenberg; a handful of hidden back streets full of second hand book shops and galleries and artist studios. The owners are a retired Dutch couple who live in Holland and winter here so the place is only available until December. 

There is a large veranda (or Stoep) to the front and a sunny little yard to the back with a covered Braai area. It is into this covered area that I will be popping the broken sofa that has been shipped all the way from Edinburgh, for the Ginger Prince to play on by day and a gift to neighbourhood stray cats by night. The place is entirely furnished and where our other 35 crates of nonsense are going to go is a different matter. Strange to think that when we packed up months ago in snowy Scotland we thought we couldn’t live without this stuff and actually haven’t missed it in the months we have been living with only what we had in our suitcases. With the exception of some things, particularly TGP’s toys.

Although not entirely child friendly and lacking a washing machine (!) the area has a great hippy, Boho feel. I have been exploring the hippy side of Cape Town more and more recently. Every week there is an outdoor market of some kind, selling farm produce and home made gifts. And Oude Molen is a great little Eco Village and stable that TGP loves because of its interactive farm. http://www.mothercityliving.co.za/oude-molen-eco-village-pinelands/

Our new neighbour-to-be is a local artist who makes sculptures out of things he has found on the beach. His house is bedecked with all manner of everything. See picture below.

I am hoping this will cheer me up when I’m dragging TGP to the launderette twice a week. 

Save me from The World of Birds

We have now been in Cape Town for just over a month and AA has settled into his job at the University whilst The Ginger Prince and I have got ourselves into a kind of routine.

My days of route taxis are over for the moment and I can now be found taking TGP out for his morning activity in a hire car, gingerly ploughing along a variety of practiced routes that I know won’t take me onto the Freeway, whilst everything beeps at me for going too slowly.  Every week includes at least one visit to Gymboree, a kind of toddler gym, and one to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. Not many places can remain tranquil once the Ginger Prince is in them but Kirstenbosch pulls it off beautifully. TGP collects sticks, paddles in streams and bothers local wildlife, whilst I sit in dappled sun at the blue green base of Table Mountain. 

Most places in Cape Town are relaxed and spacious but there are exceptions as we discovered when we visited The World of Birds in Hout Bay. Tranquil it is not. There is a never ending warren of ramshackle paths through aviaries full of literally thousands of birds from different countries bundled in together. To make the screeching and flapping even worse a colony of local wild Ibis have decided to make several huge nests on top of the expanse of chicken wire that forms the roof, giving the impression that there are so many of the creatures that they are actually blocking out the sun.

AA assured me it wasn’t cruel but, although TGP loved it of course, it gave me the creeps.

Whilst they called themselves a wildlife sanctuary the park looked like some eccentric individual’s bird and animal collection grown way, way out of control. There was probably a point in this person’s life when they could have stopped and thought, have I got enough birds in here? But they didn’t. Everywhere you look something flaps or a (wild) rat scuttles away from a bird feeder. There are also pens of multiple mammals including about 100 guinea pigs snuffling around a giant feeding bowl. It isn't that there isn't a lot to see; I particularly liked an area where tiny yellow monkeys frisk your bag for treats and play with your jewellery, but I have always thought moderation is appropriate where small animals are concerned.

TGP and AA are two of the most enthusiastic people I know and even they were shuffling feet as we traipsed through yet another circular Owl Walk and aside from AA registering his surprise that the eagle in the aviary wasn’t killing all the other birds no one said much. I became aware that we were actually walking through someone’s confused mind when we entered the Enchanted Garden which was an aviary full of literally hundreds of the kind of stone garden ornaments that can be found at any garden centre, piled up on top of each other, as well as the birds that had just happened to spill out of the other aviaries. 
The World of Birds is a modern day cautionary tale to hoarders, working on the principal that if you are going to have one of something you might as well have a hundred and fifty. The two strange notices below will allow you to make up your own minds. Suffice to say if you told me I had to live at The World of Birds in Hout Bay I would be straight back in that cupboard.