Woke up and listened to birds calling all around the garden, watching my puppies scamper back and forth, feeling the kind of unruffled happiness I have only really known in sobriety. Thinking about an immaculately boiled farm egg for breakfast, the orange yolk just right for toast soldiers.
Last night we went off to the Moonlight Market, a bright half-moon up there in the skies, but a cold wind blowing up off the dam. It reminded me of Marilynne Robinon’s fictitious Fingerlake in her first novel Housekeeping. Smoky braziers, bales of hay, rough-hewn pine benches and trestle tables, upturned fruit crates. A singularly inept folk band playing electric guitars, Afrikaner country ‘n western, dismal listening. Everyone was wincing in sympathy as the girlish middle-aged singer hit one off-key note after another. Ek verlang na jou, ad nauseam. I long for you out in the mealie fields now you have gone and taken all my money with you and broken my heart, oh how I long for you… Painful stuff.
But the stall keepers did a lively trade. I bought a very unusual and delicious sweet-potato bread, bottles of lemon cordial, shelled broad beans, tiny new courgettes (zucchini), big brown mushrooms baby fennel bulbs, stripey yellow bell peppers, cauliflower, butternut, scoops of flavoured olives, crusty goats’ cheeses. We sat at benches eating hot-smoked trout and silently booing the folk singers doing Dylan impersonations in a shrill nasal whine, the waters of the dam darkening as the moon came up overhead. Wild ducks nesting down among the reeds. Children running all around and playing with a young dalmatian dog, red-faced farmers looking at the sky for signs of rain (the aureole around the summer moon is a sure sign), women in cotton-print tops wishing they had dressed warmly.
And when wewere leaving, we found that we had been parked in, along with many others. Aimiable chaos, very South African, that cheerful disorganised country festival atmosphere. Genial idiocy.
This morning I am going to visit my friend Charlotte who has had an operation to repair damaged nerves in her right hand and is convalescing. I am taking slices of sweet-potato bread, banana muffins and wll do her washing up, help her to shower and invite her to supper. Shikkar korma with pork, plus my Egyptian tamarind vegetable curry and raitas with cooling yoghurt. Charlotte lives on cigarettes, black coffee and anxiety. She always needs a good meal and, unlike some of us, can be given two glasses of wine to help her relax. She gets dozy if she has a third glass, so never has more than two. I only got dozy after about two litres of wine, if I recall.
Then I shall plant out punnets of Italian flat-leaf parsley, more basil and another kind of rocket. Hopefully my adorable puppies will not learn to dig for another fortnight or so. After that, the garden is in for a rough time. It is windy but very bright and I have thrown damp towels over the lavender bushes to let them dry and absorb the fragrance. I used to watch housewives do that on rocky hillsides in Provence, wet linen spread out to dry over the grey and blue bushes of lavender and rosemary.
And I have been reading Terry Eagleton’s review in the Guardian of The House of Wittgenstein, on the neurotic madhouse in which the philosopher grew up. Biographer Alexander Waugh gives a full and satisfying description of this uber-dysfunctional but creative family. Like all of us who have grown up in crazymaking families-of-origin, I am always intrigued to read about other varieties of childhood straitjackets. We do survive our families, some of us anyhow.
And each day saved from the hellish undertow is a day to be lived with gusto.
Posted by louisey 