Holiday!

Right, everything is packed, the puppies and their food bowls are ready and waiting, there are five-litre containers of fresh water, sun protection creams, gaudy beach towels, huge striped umbrellas and sandals all piled high in the car boot. A holdall crammed with novels and my favourite cookbooks, notebooks and sketchpads.

 

Along with litres of grape juice, orange juice, homemade lemonade, soda and gingerbeer. Not just for me. The great discovery of early sobriety was that most people don’t drink very much alcohol, if at all. If you look across the aisles on an international flight most passengers will have a still mineral water with their meals. I had assumed everyone drank as much as they dared before boarding and then took out tiny discreet bottles of vodka to pass the time until offered drinks  with the meal. Flying blind was how it worked. Now I know that most people don’t think about alcohol, let alone drink it, for most of their everyday life. Imagine that!

It is hot and sunny and I can’t wait to feel clean white beach sand between my toes.

 

Take care of yourselves while I am away and I shall have a glut of blog-reading when I get back!

 

Love and thanks to everyone who has helped me stay sober another 24 hours…

A froggie would a wooing go

Not a peaceful night in Puppyland. I woke up from a bad dream at 2am and went through to the kitchen for a glass of water. It had ben raining and the back garden was fragrant and damp. I let out the puppies and they ran around on the wet grass, giving their squeaky little barks.

 

Then Jez caight a frog. She tore around the garden with the poor little creature in her mouth and brought it into the kitchen, trying to swallow it in gulps. I got the frog away from her and it hopped out of the back door, hopefully just hurt from shock and bruising. I had shut my other puppy in the bathroom.

 

Then my frog-eating puppy was sick and began to foam at the mouth from the toxins in the clammy frog skin. I was not madly sympathetic because dogs have to learn to leave frogs alone. But none of us got much sleep. My housemate has a phobia about frogs and stayed in bed with her eyes squeezed shut. The frog was a lovely rare little tree frog just sitting enjoying the rain when pounced upon.

 

I am very relieved sometimes that my puppies are not kittens. I had a grey cat who spent years trying to teach me to hunt by dropping live geckos and lizards and mole rats into the bath as I reclined there all pink and unsuspecting with cucumber rings over my eyes, basking in hot water, thinking peaceful thoughts until suddenly faced with a scrabbling molerat and the encouraging glance of my graceful cat. Not a Beatrix Potter moment.

 

Pausing here to wish all my American friends in the recovery blogging community a happy and sober Thanksgiving. I am so glad you are part of my journey and I feel privileged to read about your lives and experience, strength and hope. It’s a jungle out there people, take care!

Summer’s lease

Getting ready to go away on holiday, making lists and buying essentials. Walked down several streets to have my hair cut and coloured — how I miss being a natural redhead. Vanity of course, but none of that coppery auburn mass of shining hair can ever be replicated. Sat while Tisa (not her real name) massaged my scalp and chatted to me about her new fiance whom she has only known for five months. She wants to ask him if he has ever been married before but is too shy. She is 21 and he is 47 or 57. She is in awe of him being an older man and he is going to manage her business and ‘run her life’ after they marry next month. I could see my jaundiced expression in the mirror. Young women and troubled men of an age to know better.

A gorgeous byronic beast of a black-and-white cat named Sylvester lounged on the counter and watched us with benevolent detachment. Her fiance is allergic to cats but Tisa says he will have to get over it, because men are men and all very necessary but a cat is the cornerstone of a girl’s life. An intreresting menage a trois this will be…

 

Then went off to a new mini-shopping mall up in the mountains. I don’t do shopping malls and would much rather go for small family-owned shops and farmers’ markets but I zipped in and out almost as if I had not been in there at all. Discovered when I got home that I have delicious little jars of anchovies and dark green extra-virgin olive oil and a locally made Taleggio cheese but no dish-washing liquid.

 

There is a storm brewing in the Overberg, black clouds and fierce humidity. We stopped near the dam on our way home to collect home-cured bacon and smoked butter from Sean the artisan producer, looked at the waters of the dam turning black with cloud-shadow. Hanging planters of ivy-leaved pelargoniums scarlet and a shocking pure white, great colour against the raw brickwork.

 

Came back to whirling and squeaking puppies with slimy rawhide chews in their mouths. The kind of cold slimy chews I wll step on in the kitchen when I am half-asleep and think I have trod on a dead snail. But the furniture is still intact.

And now back to Nanowrimo and editing, more lists to be checked off and suitcases to be taken down, quilts put in, extra towels, buckets and spades. I feel quite giddy with pleasure.

Barometer falling

Above an old mahogany bookcase in the living room, my housemate has put up the barometer she inherited from her father. It is a late 19th-century mercury barometer set in dark wood and monitors air pressure. Ship’s captains once used measurements of air pressure to help find surface troughs, high pressure systems, and frontal boundaries in order to predict storms at sea. These days most of us just watch the television weather forecasts.

 

The barometer is falling and that means we are in for more bad weather even though the skies are deceptively blue and cloudless. I have decided against taking more plant cuttings to pot up until I get back from holiday. I don’t want the cuttings to drown or dry out while I am away.

Last night Paul P came around to fix a new gate  at the entrance to the long stoep or verandah, so that the puppies can play out there and watch people going past in the street. An attractive little wooden gate. Paul is a good craftsman but interminably slow, so I made him cups of black coffee and encouraged him to keep going while he dithered and talked about his neighbour, who is a lonely woman alcoholic. Paul has all the stern disapproval of a former drunk, white-knuckling his way to sobriety. He thinks it is all about will power. Most of the year he is teetotal and proud of himself. Then he goes on a bender and leaves unfinished jobs all around the village and his wife goes to stay with her mother and he makes himself horribly ill. He drags himself back to life and goes around completing his carpentry tasks and mending gates and sash windows and putting up shutters, working  with a hangdog expression until his wife returns and he settles into his dry period.

 

Everyone else can see the pattern and spot the next bender coming, but Paul never suspects a thing. He would consider it a sign of moral weakness to ask for help. He is not an alcoholic because alcoholics can’t stop drinking and he can stop most of the time. Except when he can’t.

 

His neighbour, whom I shall call Elsabe, is a daily drinker, sipping away at glasses of sweet wine from dawn to dusk. She rarely seems fall-down drunk, but she is never sober. She just sits in her house all alone, living on a tiny pension and spending most of it on sherry and wine. She doesn’t eat much and Paul says that if she ate properly, she wouldn’t get tipsy.

 

As I sat and listened to Pul last night I thought that here we are in 2008 and so little is known about alcoholism that we might as well be talking about a rare disease only seen once in a blue moon. There are active alcoholics living on every street of this quiet little village. The more I understnd of my own ‘arrested’ alcoholism and sobriety contingent on a daily reprieve, the more cunning, baffling and powerful it seems to me. I once thought that only alcoholics were really in denial about the nature of alcoholism. Now I know that those closest to alcoholics share the denial. Most public educational institutions share that denial, Church pastors and congregations share that denial. Media is as blinkered and ignorant as anyone else, in part because many media workers see alcoholism as old-fashioned and to be conflated with all kinds of other addictions.

 

I tried to talk to Paul a little about the way in which patterns of habitual drinking get worse. About the commonality to be found in all kinds of alcoholism. He just smiled at me and shook his head. He has never seen me drunk, he would never think of a respectable woman active in the community as alcoholic. He doesn’t think women can be alcoholic unless they are prostitutes or feeble-minded. Alcoholics are unshaven smelly old men begging for money outside the bottlestore.

 

He doesn’t know there is bad weather on the way.

You need not be a house to be haunted

 

 

 

The worst dreams I have are those in which my dead brother, killed by a landmine almost 30 years ago, stands at the foot of my bed and tells me how much he wants to live.

This was a day that started so well and it seems to be ending very pleasantly, but there was what the French call un mauvais quart d’heure along the line. I fell asleep after six hours of writing in which I finally reached 31 000 words of the Nanowrimo novel, as well as two hours of editing. I am working flat-out, can hardly stop to think. Not a good idea in early recovery. I fell asleep and I had a nightmare about my little brother who died so long ago.

 

In the Third World we all understand war. We know that deep and literal psychosis around violence, we know the derangement of values that follows. We know that because war is unspeakable, there is nothing to say about it. I have lain awake with old Hunter bombers tearing overhead into Mozambique, I have lain awake at night while rocket mortars ripped into the front of the family homestead, I have lain listening to mortars  explode into the town in which I grew up and smash even the taped-up windows of streetfront shops. I have lived through raids into Lesotho,  waking at 2am to the armoured vehicles in the streets and the sound of gunfire. On my bedside table there is a photograph of a lovely friend with her baby daughter. The baby is awake and smiling at the camera, her mother is dead with congealed blood on her face. And I have woken up in Kenya and turned on the bedside radio to hear the military music that signals a military coup and the seizure of airports as well as radio stations. I have seen foreign forces launch air strikes into the Horn of Africa and the Gold Coast and helped sit with the dying when there was no medical help available, sat with screaming people waiting for morphine that doesn’t arrive.  At funerals I have seen armed police open fire on mourners with live ammunition. I have been teargassed and imprisoned and arrested again and again. War is like a subtext to my life. This is not about me, it is the story of my generation.

 

My alcoholism has nothing to do with any of this. War experiences may have exacerbated or accelerated the progress of that alcoholism, but the causal roots lie in my genetic history. Many others went through what I did and worse, and they did not become alcoholic.

When i was interviewed at the Tavistock Institute in a quiet street of Bloomsbury in London for a project on war trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, one very gentle and kind psychiatrist with a fluffy goatee and smll nervous hands said to me. ‘You must feel others get off very easily.’

 

I was completely gobsmacked for a minute or two.

 

‘No’, I said to him. ‘I don’t think anyone gets off easy in life. But war is an aberration and nobody should have to endure it.  In an ideal world.’

How I love my life now. The simplicity and appreciation for each day without drama, violence or tragedy. And how I miss my brother, cheated of his life. Ave atque vale, my beloved brother.

A skylight cracks open

Last night  my friend Charlotte arrived on the doorstep and asked me to go with her to the carol concert. She had spent the weekend all alone proofreading and desperately needed to get out, wanted to just be around others. I agreed to go along with her because I could see the prospect of going up there alone was too daunting for her. I have known times like that. 

 

She loved it, the small children with thin pure voices, the church filled with sumptuous but ghastly flower arrngements, great frosted proteas crowding out the altar and dwarfing the massed roses. Everyone ( except myself I suppose, in a loose linen top and denims) dressed up respectably for church in hats and cotton suits, pastel frocks and smart shoes, the men in jackets and ties. The dominee or preacher very emotional, bellowing at God as if at a deaf and slow-witted celebrity. Much of the singing was in Afrikaans and I struggled to follow the biblical readings in High Dutch. My heart a stone when it comes to faith of this kind. Afterwards we walked down the street in pale moonlight and saw the older villagers sitting out on their stoeps (porches). My front garden smelling strongly of a pale heliotrope, the smell of cherry pie. Dripping with water from the sprinklers, leaves of a  tall hibiscus shining in starlight.

 

I came back to whirling demented puppies overjoyed to see me again, squealing their hearts out. We sat and had a love fest on the sofa. Then I sat up reading, had a late pasta supper of baby spinach in a little cream, field mushrooms and Parmesan with tagliatelli when Una got back. Lay awake battling the sense of dread I get each year at this time, the hopelessness coming over me in great waves of sensation.The dark and painful past that is never past, the failures, the bereavements, the memories of war, the wasted years.

Woke up this morning tired and distressed and after coffee called my friend Diana — she is about to get married and I am very happy for her. I had not wanted contact with her for much of this year because I did not want to talk about the hard times I had been going through. Cowardice and misplaced pride.

 

She was almost as delighted to hear my voice as my puppies were to see me last night. The conversation was full of love and excitement and plans to meet. She is helping with design on a development in China and would love me to work with her, she is happier than I have ever known her to be, her enchanting daughter has become the teenage femme fatale from hell in the space of six months, she is writing her wedding vows and pouring her soul into them.

It was like coming to life, hearing another self within me laughing and teasing and welcoming opportunities. For the last few months I have been licking my wounds in splendid isolation and now I am free to begin living again. I needed to have some seclusion after returning to Africa and the only relating I have done in any committed sense has been online with the recovery community and off-line with my puppies. Una and myself have gone very gently with one another, but the old vivacity has not been there.

And suddenly I am dreaming of travelling through China, spending time in Shanghai, working on writing projects, connecting, befreinding, learning and growing. Moving on from the hiatus of this year. The heaviness I felt last night has gone, the sense of renewal palpable.

 

But before I do that I need to get further with my own writing, see what is publishable. I am not going to make the required 50 000 words for Nanowrimo, I will be lucky to make 30 000. There is some very good material in the draft I have worked on, but some of it is tied up in knots. I need time to sort and distill. And I must give myself that time. While I am away in Cape Agulhas next week I shall take a break. Perhaps write a short story or a poem. Then I shall start work again in mid-December.

Possibility. That is the door I felt had closed in me. That experience in Wales hurt me more than I care to admit. The focus on sobriety never wavered, but I lost faith in human nature, in the notion of love or selflessness. Now I can admit that and write it down because a space has opened up inside me and the dread has receded.

No longer groping in an airless dark, there is a glimmering of light at the end of the tunnel. A skylight cracked open.

Honey from the jar

Sunday morning. Took my sleepy puppies out into the garden just before dawn this morning — a rooster crowing in the distance — and the air was sweet and damp, still full of the night-scented jasmine. One of the great gifts of sobriety is being able to enjoy the dawn each morning, to wake up clear-headed and eager to begin the day.

 

A friend is coming for lunch. She rang, sounding down, and I invited her over. I shall go Arabic because I have a small bottle of pomegranate juice. For the main course I shall make Mjaddarah, which consists of golden caramelised onions with lentils and rice, very basic, but delicious.  Then a spinach dish with cinnamon and tomato, and a salad of finely sliced raw fennel bulb, oranges and olives. My friend is not vegetarian, in fact she is a dedicated meat-eater, but at this time of the month, a bulb of raw fennel is as good as it gets and she will get a chance to expand her culinary horizons. I will warn her about the cinnamon because it is a key ingredient but startling to someone who only encounters it in pancakes with syrup. If she really hates the food despite the fragrant and enticing aromas filling the house, I shall make her a scrambled egg on toast.

 

Then we shall have halved fresh figs with honey and a creamy Greek-style yoghurt. I am tempted to poach the figs in pomegranate syrup with star anise but this is a friend of little imagination who is fond of the familiar. She likes spreadsheets that balance and meals with three courses that arrive on time. But today she must sit out on the grass and eat tender figs with honey running down her chin while the puppies gambol around us.

 

When I was eleven years old, my father took my sister and myself with him on a business trip to Tangiers in northern Morocco, off the Straits of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic. A Phoenician port that became Roman, then Byzantine, French and Berber.

 

I loved Tangiers, the desert flowing up to the city walls, the tall raffia palms, the alleys and labyrinths of the souk, the older parts of the city still medieval. When I went out and walked around with the hotel guide on hot afternoons, we could hear fountains splashing from behind the walls concealing courtyards of orange trees and date palms. I desperately hoped somebody would kidnap me and let me stay in a harem with blue mosaics and patterned rugs, smoke opium and loll around in veils, wearing nothing but musky perfumes, eating sugary pigeon pies all day.

 

In later years I read Arabic love poetry, ghazals, and then the novels of Paul and Jane Bowles set in Tangiers, as well as the North African writer Mohommed Choukri. Another kind of Africa entered my imagination, replacing the overheated adolescent daydreams. Before I returned to travel through the three countries of the Maghrib — Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia — I had read the feminist fiction of Zahra al-Jlasi, what is collected as al-Nas al-Muʾannath and I had stopped having fantasies about harems. I still have fantasies about the food though, and make the fiery chilli paste known as harissa each month, along with tagines of lamb with couscous. The other favourite in the Maghrib is rosewater, but that is too sweet and cloying for me, although I like a spoonful in a basin of water to wash my face in the summer heat.

As the sun rises in the sky, it is getting uncomfortably hot and I need to get back to work. I put cubes of ice in the puppies’ drinking water, their stainless steel bowls filled to the brim, so that the clean water stays cool for longer. I myself prefer steaming hot cups of leaf tea, which oddly works to keep me cool.

 

Abundance. Something else to be grateful for on a summer morning with swallows looping over the grass and the newly planted drifts of agapanthus.

Experiment in living

An overcast and muggy Saturday morning, woke up clammy and  with a pounding heart from nightmares that vanished from memory as I sat up in bed.

Read As Bill Sees It and struggled to meditate, had coffee and then fed the puppies and took them outside. We all did an improvised stagey version of the old classic from the Pointer Sisters, Jump (For My Love) on the dew-wet grass, great fun.

 

I have to go up and admire flower arrangements set out on lace doilies in the Eureka Church Hall of the Dutch Reformed Church. The village ladies have been torturing roses and dried leaves into ikebana sculptures all week and tying up purple statice and pink lupins with gilt ribbons and tinsel for a Christmassy flavour. The centrepiece is a little wooden crib with rosebuds strung up into pink pyramids and marguerite daisies glued into lettering that spells out ‘Jesus Came to Make Us Good’ which I know will look blasphemous if not obscene to me but might convert some neo-Goth teenager to the virtues of Protestant morality. There will be bonsai with tiny coloured lights, and large grey stones with African violets clinging artfully to the granite sides, entitled ‘After Rodin’s Thinker’. Nothing I detest more than retro 1950s flower arrangements, but my neighbours will be hurt if I don’t go along and ooh and aah.

 

Anyhow. I bathed and washed my hair and dressed in respectable chinos and a summery top. Then, with singular lack of forethought, I went out and dug holes in which to plant clumps of agapanthus. I had to divide the clumps with a large spade and nearly cleaved my small foot in two. Few grown adults are as clumsy as I am and my gardening often counts as a high-risk activity. I shut the baby pups indoors out of harm’s way. Then I planted the clumps, spaded up more dirt, firmed down the earth with lively stamping and watered them.

 

After which I realised my clothes were muddy and sopping and my fingernails black with dirt. So I am about to have another bath and find some more summery and respectable clothes for the flower viewing.

Then, when I get back to the house, I shall make Popazoi, a Sicilian soup with beans and pearl barley. This is ‘poor food’ because there is not much else in the house to eat, but it is not a winter soup since the recipe calls for handfuls of fresh chopped parsley and I have plenty of parsley in the front garden. With garlic and parsley, it is less stodgy, delicious and filling. If friends pop in they can eat a bowlful or two with us.

And this afternoon I shall do some editing and work on the novel. My last five pages read as if written by a clean and sober Hunter Thompson, illogical but dull, Gonzo invective that takes a walk on the tame side. Damn, damn, damn.

And so the day opens out, no dramas, no great expectations, no storms in a teacup. The ongoing experiment in living with no escape from consciousness. Putting one foot in front of the other and appreciating the journey.

Power surge

Woke up refreshed and seemingly revitalised, had a quick shower with a small wagtail singing to me from her perch on the branch of an elder tree just outside the bathroom window. Sat down and wrote 2 500 words before having a cup of coffee.

 

This, friends, is not inspiration or a visit from my lackadaisical Muse: sadly, it is probably the hormonal swing of early menopause. Swing low, sweet chariot! I’ve been very lucky in that I do not have the severe mood shifts many women suffer from along with bloating or flushes or sudden tiredness. But I get little bursts of energy and then get sleepy or peckish. My friend Shauna calls these hormonal swings ‘power surges’ and I make the most of them.

 

And talking of once-taboo subjects, I had a comment from someone who wants to pay me for talking at regular intervals about Viagra on my blog. Five dollars each time I mention Viagra, Viagra, Viagra!

Unfortunately I have nothing to say about Viagra. I think it is  a way for elderly men to give themselves unwanted heart attacks. I would rather be intimate with somebody unable to do penile penetration but desirous of mutual back rubs than someone who thinks sex is about high performance and how long, how many times, how many orgasms etc. So, Floyd the sex-aid salesman, consider yourself spammed off into hyperreality to join mad Mickey Clontarf the Holy One of Whatever. 

My puppies have taught themselves to dance on their hind legs at suppertime. I don’t believe in teaching cute tricks to small dogs, but these must have poodle in them somewhere because they are very keen to join the circus, love being watched and praised for doing Fred & Ginger imitations. They are naturals at tap dancing. No obedience though. Singin’ in the rain, jus’ singing in the rain…

My murdered character won’t stay dead. He keeps popping up and making hamfisted jokes and inserting himself into the wrong beds, botching his scrambled eggs along with his seduction attempts. I feel like someone who has had her crossword puzzle taken away and completed by a mad uncle in a sombrero.

And my heavenly garden is now a territory mined with small but deep holes dug by disobedient puppies. A lovely ginger-scented pelargonium has been knocked sideways. A salient reminder that I am not in charge here. I am simply a small person in a mysterious universe, doing my own little dance of praise in the sunlight.

Writer’s block

Introduced a sudden death into my floundering Nanowrimo novel and none of the characters wanted anything to do with it. My word count has declined to 500 words a day and I have abandoned my plot outlines in despair.

My tiny puppies have a new game in which they dash between my legs as I walk and try to overtake one of my feet. I am terrifid of tripping and falling on them. When my lovely older friend Aletta was dying, one of her granddaughters asked:

“What  important thing have you learned from living so long? Like, spiritual, you know.’

Aletta brightened.

“Never step over a sleeping dog, not even a small one,’ she said, with feeling.

 

The day began cold and misty but has suddenly turned into a scorcher. Too hot to sit outdoors and read in the shade, so I am stying in the study with a long cool glass of homemade gingerbeer. My old-fashioned Salvia leucantha is flowering in velvety purple and white. A wild sweet pea is rambling through the white marguerites and throwing up lilac and mauve blooms. A cutworm has killed my surviving basil plants.

The old rambling roses, shamefully neglected are flowering profusely. This weekend the house will be filled with blue and silver bowls of crimson and pale yellow roses, the fragrance sweetening the rooms. My housemate will be working, so I shall be alone with the puppies, my books and music. I am going to listen to Schubert and browse through gardening manuals to plan out autumn planting, stretched out on the sofa with puppies tumbling around me. And I shall endeavour to get on with the writing, but will be lucky to make 30 000 words by the end of the month. Some sections of the text are not bad and I may be able to work with them. But the whole scheme needs a rethink.

 

Stuckness doesn’t feel like a learning curve but in retrospect it is always valuable. So long as I can push on through.

A plump blonde woman with a ruined left eye arrived on the doorstep last night to invite us to a boat outing on the dam as part of the local amateur musical society. We would climb onto a raddled pleasure steamer, an old unstable catamaran and sail around the smll dam listening to Bacharach while eating a shipboard brunch in the blazing sun.

 

‘Please do come,’ she coaxed. ‘It will be just like a booze cruise.’

 

I inwardly winced and tried not to sound too Scroogelike or abrupt when I declined. Drinking liquor at 9am on an unsafe boat on a small reed-bound dam, all of us sitting there in the heat with no shelter from the sun and listening to Burt Bacharach on an empty stomach as we wait for the defrosted and stale toasted sandwiches to be passed around… heat stroke, alcohol poisoning, death by accidental drowning, musical overkill.

Instead of going along and risking boat-rage or worse, I shall get up in the cool of dawn to garden and then make a peach sorbet with fresh mint leaves. It has always interested me that at the end of his satirical novel Candide, Voltaire offers this advice to those who have survived plagues and earthquakes and revolutions and the auto-da-fe in Lisbon: ‘Cultivez votre jardin.’

 

Stay at home far from the madness of war and the courts of princes and tend your garden. Mind your own business, take care of your small acre of earth, watch things grow and recover your sanity. Find happiness and contentment where you are, be satisfied with what comes your way.  Candide is a wonderful novel and I wish I had a copy in the house.