if life gives you lemons, fight back!

Bunches of lemons! A whole small but enthusiastic tree full! My sister and I spent all day making marmalade, a word which is surprisingly difficult to spell given that I always try to replace at least one a with a random e. Marmalade-making requires two people when the third is my niece, who is ridiculously cute but only six months old, and is thus in heavy training for being a teenage drama queen and the centre of attention at all times. (Who knew they started so young?). We are all three sticky but marmalade-enabled, and the tree, which has those ridiculously nasty spines coupled with really tough stems, only bit me once. *beats chest triumphantly*. Anyway, I have small pots of home-made lemon marmalade to give away to deserving Capetonian friends who ask me first.

My Friendly Psychologist has just told me a marvellous story about her parents, who are sweet, elderly silver-haired German people of extremely cultured gentleness. They were toddling down St. George's Mall the other day when a bunch of teenage thugs suddenly surrounded them, jostled them, and grabbed the FP's father's wallet. Undaunted, with lightning reflexes, the FP's mother smacked the pickpocket's hand away, causing him to drop the wallet, which she promptly picked up. The FP's father, meanwhile, had grabbed the two thugs flanking him by the front of their shirts and slammed them up against the nearest shop front. (Apparently he boxed in his youth). Upon his wife informing him, in dulcet German, that she had the wallet, dear, he dropped the somewhat stunned thugs, and the two proceeded to toddle on their way, leaving a wake of devastation, flabberghastliness and street cred ground terminally underfoot. Apart from causing me enormous joy at its illustration of Terry Pratchett's Little Wrinkly Smiling Man Rule, and random flashbacks to the Monty Python vandal grannies, this little incident is leaving me with one very firmly-learned moral, viz, don't mess with the Germans.