Just Daily Notes

Sunday 17^th June 2012

Jeff arrived on Monday as the sun shivered over the trees – which at this time of year is just on 08h00. I had just started to boil water for the first cup of coffee, which took a long time, since the temperature had dropped to 7 degrees during the night. Jeff was eager to get to work, and went off to tame some more aliens while I tackled the tedious business of making us smooth Maltabela sorghum porridge for breakfast. I snatched moments in the sun between stirring the porridge every thirty seconds when the microwave “pinged”. Hurrying the process will be punished with lumps of uncooked sorghum in the porridge – which is not nice. I loved it as a child, but now understand why we didn’t have it that often, and why, when we did, it had lumps in it!

After breakfast outside in the sun, I decided that it would make sense for us to work together on filling the compost bin. I had already laid a criss-cross base of recently cut alien timber in the bottom of the bin to allow for good airflow. We took most of the day to lay alternate layers of grass cuttings, topsoil and damp, decaying leaves and twigs which Jeff raked from between the tree stumps in the fire break behind the cabin.

We moved on to recovering stones from the Pond to finish the day, and were tipping a last load of stones into a gully in the road when we were hailed by Juffrou Smal from down the hill, asking Jeff to call on her on his way home. We returned to the cabin and were having our “Knock-off coffee” (and peanut-butter sandwich) when Juffrou’s grand-nephew Kayden appeared in the door. He shyly and carefully handed me a large, warm plastic shopping bag – a plate of hot of battered fish & home made bread from Juffrou Smal for me! I was very touched – it meant more than not having to cook my own supper… I walked down with Jeff to say thank-you to Juffrou, and found her scurrying about the kitchen. She shyly but graciously accepted my thanks, saying that she was cooking for Jacob & Sina anyway. Jacob and Sina are an endearing old couple I’ve noticed at Klub Tessalonika gatherings. Their San bloodline is very evident – both are small-boned, miniature people, and they’re clearly devoted to each other. Sadly, it seems Tannie Sina is now in very poor health.

Jeff wanted to work again on Tuesday, saying that we had to make use of the rain-free days while we could. It made sense to me, so we scratched away at site levelling. I say “scratched away” because I was still trying to make sense of the existing foundations and the different floor-levels in the house relative to the ground level outside. The present structure has no damp-course, but I want to lay one below the new floor-slab anyway and have it match the level of the damp-course in the new section. Since Christa and I hope to grow old together here, I want to avoid steps anywhere within the house and keep the floor level as low as possible to make it easy to get in and out of the house.

The day had started out misty and cold and became windier while we worked. The wind brought heavier mist, then “Guti” as Christa calls it. “Guti” is a Swahili word for wind-driven light rain. In East Africa it may be warm, but here it certainly wasn’t, so we knocked off for an early lunch of soup and bread. (…and a peanut-butter sandwich – well, Jeff had the peanut-butter, which seems to be his favourite food. I substituted an avocado sandwich, which is not Jeff’s favourite food.) Since the rain seemed to have set in, we called it a half day and I took Jeff down to the shop, since I needed to buy electricity. I rather suspect that Jeff wanted to buy a “kannetjie” of wine…

Since I was confined to quarters, I started doing my VAT return. Soon though, the weather began to clear and I had just grasped at the excuse to get outside again when I had a surprise visit from Steve. Surprise because I thought he was Cape town. Sadly his trip had been delayed because one of his dogs had been run over on the Hermanus road near his home. Ever since his beloved old foundling, “Wagter”, died two years ago Steve has had a bad run with pets – “Tippie” is the fourth dog that has died or has had to be put down.

At about 08h30 on Wednesday morning Jeff appeared with a new Laundress in tow – Stephanie is a relative of Nita, who of course didn’t appear last Friday because of the rain. I entrusted her with a healthy pile of laundry, since today promised to be bright and sunny. I’m pleased to have found someone to do my laundry at last. I put the word out some time ago via the passers-by who commute through the property. They used to beg unashamedly for money, but I’ve made it clear that although I won’t give money to anybody, when I can afford to provide work for the villagers I will do so.

Although there was not a breath of wind, Jeffrey was doing a good impersonation of Buster Keaton fighting a severe headwind on a heaving deck. I deduced from his inebriated mumbling that he wanted a lift to Caledon to collect his pension from his niece Verna. I had met Verna independently last year as a potential client while doing the infamous bank job. She is a solid, principled lady who does her best to look after her wayward Uncle Jeffrey. I took Jeff all the way to Verna’s neat Bergsig home,where she often also cares for a succession of “waifs & strays” – battered, troubled or orphaned children from the wider community. Had a bit of a chat to her – we’re both worried that Jeff’s alcoholism seems to be getting worse, but there is only so much you can do for an independent adult.

I had just collected a basket at SPAR when Sandy phoned, inviting me for coffee at Café Letta’s next door. I had a very short shopping list, so we agreed that I would join her when I was done. Just as I was about to have the veggies weighed, however, I bumped into Cobus Visser, the chicken farmer who had come to my rescue during the Great Fire earlier this year. We chatted for quite a while, so I phoned Sandy afterwards to apologise, but she said that there was no hurry – she had brought Tannie Sina’s family to town to be at the old lady’s deathbed and was waiting for a call from the Hospital…

Since my compost-bin heat source will take a while to get sorted out, I had been considering buying some kind of heater. A gas heater would be prefferable, but I have a suitable spare bottle in Johannesburg, so it doesn’t make sense to buy another. SPAR was having a special on an elegant low-powered electric heater, so I succumbed to one of those for the princely expenditure of R100. It will probably provoke Mach Numbers from the digital readout of my pre-paid Eskom meter, but the effect on room temperature remains to be seen.

Although Thursday is Jeff’s usual day to work for me, he didn’t appear at all. Not surprising really, considering the condition he was in when I last saw him. Actually, I was glad he didn’t turn up because I had written late into the night and overslept slightly. It was one of those glorious blue-sky and dead calm Cape winter days, so instead of my workaday bowl of oats porridge, I took the time to treat myself to a rather tasty omelette “brekkie” in front of the cabin.

I carried on with site-levelling, but adopted a new approach, which is to mark out the extent of the additions and set levels for the outlines of those areas, referenced from the existing foundations. This way I can see the most efficient way to move earth from high areas to low areas. Once that is done it will be easier to slope the ground away from the new foundations too.

I’ve also started to collect stones of all sizes as I go, throwing them into a cracked plastic paint drum which I then empty onto the eroded road up the property. Well, I manage to get some of them into the drum – the rest I have to scoop up later – I was never very good at Tombola!

I came back to the cabin for a late lunch, but instead of going back to the site immediately, I wrestled my way through some VAT calculations on the new laptop for an hour or so. Rather than spend a stupid amount of money to replace my “ancient” Microsoft Office, I’ve changed to Open Source applications as far as possible. Open Office Calc is great, but some manipulations require a slightly different approach – especially on a complex Excel sheet imported from the old laptop.

Once I’d done some useful learning, I went back to the building site and worked at levelling until I could barely see to collect the tools, then retreated to the cabin for a glorious hot shower!

I really wanted to spend some time in the workshop on Friday – there are various little jobs to do, like making proper stands for each end of my improvised water-level, or improving my home made shower-tidy. First though, I went to the Site to assess my progress, and pretty soon I was back with shovel, rake and wheelbarrow.

I wonder if I’m beginning to become addicted to physical work? I thought I would be able to “think things through” while working at this project, but I’ve discovered that the true therapy value lies in the fact that physical labour actually displaces thoughts of anything else. One is too busy calculating where to toss the next shovelful, or just how much to rake from the high spots. Occasionally, during a breather to wipe the sweat from my brow, thoughts from outside would intrude: Guilt about being here at all; Have I taken on more than I can manage? Will it ever be finished? Shouldn’t I be doing “something useful”? I concluded that being in the open air on a glorious, still, blue-sky day, preparing to build a house by gently shovelling earth from one place to another is no more pointless than sitting in Johannesburg fretting about where the next job would come from.

I need to take time out to improve living conditions in the cabin. I’ve lived for a week or two at a time on a yacht, which is even more cramped, but it was cleverly designed, with enough small storage spaces to keep things separate but easily accessible. As I get settled in I find it increasingly irritating to have to unpack a shelf to get to something that I need. I improvised a little on Saturday, nailing a slatted wooden crate high above the folding table and fixing a scrap of plasterboard above the curtain-rail to hold books and music CDs. I clearly need more shelves and little cupboards, but the problem is that timber is astonishingly expensive. I may just bite the bullet next week and fetch several lengths of “knotty pine” ceiling board from the co-op. It’s about the thinnest and cheapest timber obtainable.

I have had no palpitation-inducing bureaucratic encounters for a while, so these posts have become little more than a daily diary, which must be pretty boring for the few people – if any – who read my weekly mutterings. Perhaps the blog is sapping energy I should be directing at creative writing, because I’ve written little or nothing else for a while. I’m sometimes tempted to write commentary on some of the socio-political goings on in the hinterland beyond the Valley, but that belongs on my dormant writing site, and in any case most of what’s going on out there is terrifyingly shoulder-sagging to anyone who can’t help connecting stuff in the traffic report with what isn’t reported in the news bulletin.

Perhaps I should just post a few pretty pictures I took this week…

Of course just about everything around me is green – not quite the “Desperate Green” of a Finnish Spring, but the nearest I’ve seen.

As I walk back to the cabin in the late afternoon, the low light makes the grass and fynbos glow in a way that lifts even my morose heart…

Sunset on Fynbos

For a few weeks now, these pretty little five-petalled flowers have been blooming between the trees in the woods, especially the areas that were opened up as a fire-break.

The time stamp on the camera file of this lightning bolt is 03h08 Saturday night. I was using “Cheap Time” to manage a massive download of files to my Johannesburg computer when suddenly I heard the rumble of thunder. The Cape sky was alive with lighting! Mostly sheet-lighting which produced lovely bass rumbles, but interspersed with an occasional Highveld Cracker that must have had Capies diving under their beds! I hand-held the camera and opened the shutter on an area of sky where I’d seen lightning – as soon as the bolt flashed I let go the button. Of course of several attempts I produced mostly black frames and a few totally washed out pictures. Not a brilliant photograph, just a curiosity.

Lightning storm - taken at about 3 AM