Freckles & Doubt

For once I have remembered to note that it's my blog's birthday. I first posted on 31st January 2005. That's nine years of blogging. 1 657 entries, counting this one. That's one every 1.98 days, if the weather hasn't robbed me of my tiny vestiges of mathematical ability. People have posted 10 732 comments. The longest hiatus in posting has been the ten days or so in July 2011 while I was in hospital with my feet exploded. I think it's fair to assume that I quite like writing stuff, for some reason. Or am actually addicted to words. Or uncommonly cussed. Probably all three.

Cape Town is having heatwaves. I think it's almost allowed to, usually they come in February and that's ... in a few hours, now. (Alas January. I'm sure there was something else I was planning to do with you, but oh well). Be that as it may, today was ungodly, stinking, improbable hot. This is something of a continuing theme: this weekend the foot pedal on my sewing machine inconveniently burst into smoke and melted plastic in the middle of a skirt reconstruction, so possibly Hell is closer to the surface than usual. I spent the only tolerable hour or two this afternoon sitting in the living room (in the middle of a power cut, for some reason - Capetonians, turn off your aircon. It isn't fair that you have it when I don't) with my feet in a bucket of water and ice. Turns out this reduces my swollen ankles immediately and dramatically, which is useful, as the combination of heat and running round conducting orientation for four days gives me puffy feet like whoa and dammit. I can't even blame the DVT, they used to do this while I was running roleplaying cons and SCA events, years before my leg inconveniently exploded on the way to Australia. I don't like this weather. Have you noticed?

Fortunately, given the heat, the Revenge of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Army of Reconstruction has finished the remodelling of the front wall and departed for points unknown, which means we don't have to deal with dust as well as heat in that sort of misguided fake Western movie fashion. They have left behind a rather spanky carport and pristine section of new wall in addition to the traditional blasted heath which always attends their efforts. Viz.:




I thumb my nose in the general direction of the hadeda aerial bombardment of my car, now frustrated. Hah!

I know "I'll stop the world" from Nouvelle Vague, for whom I have a somewhat unbecoming passion quite apart from their bossa nova version of this song, which has an insidiously beautiful lyric line. I do vaguely know the Modern English original (quite a fun music video, despite o lord the 80s), but it's not a patch on the cover.

Cape Town is having Winter, TM, slightly late but with immense seriousness and inordinate quantities of water. Traffic has been horrible, particularly this morning, when it took me 20 minutes to inch up the hill to campus. It turned out that this was not because large chunks of road on the N2 had been washed away, as is the way of my people in winter. Far more amusingly, it was because a divvil of some sort had possessed the traffic light just before the freeway exit, so that it was cheerfully showing to our road, at any one time, either three green lights and one red, or three red lights and one green. You have no idea how dislocating this is. And, for some reason, how amusing. I'm still giggling. It seems to undermine some fundamental truth in your average driver, producing a sort of bewildered contemplation which plays out as follows (and I could see exactly this thought process in the cars ahead of me even before it happened to me):

TRAFFIC LIGHT: *cheerfully shows three red lights and one green*
CAR: is confused. Treats this carefully like a malfunctioning robot: stops, checks, is about to go when:
TRAFFIC LIGHT: *changes cheerfully and without warning to three green lights and one red*
CAR: responds like Pavlov's dogs to the green light for a microsecond by starting to take off before having brain exploded by the lone red. Is confused. Treats this carefully like a malfunctioning robot, stops, checks, drives on with head spinning. Or, if me, in a fit of the giggles.

We are creatures of order, and traffic lights are unquestioned beacons of coherent guidance in our orderly worldview. Except when they aren't. Then our heads explode.

I have not been blogging of late because of... thing. I'm not sure what, actually. I have, however, spent an entire weekend with the Jo inventing a new, exciting and minimalist LARP system which encourages players, Fiasco-like, to invent the plot themselves from minimal cues. Currently it's labouring under the working title of "Space Amnesia", which is really a literal description of its workings. We shall be hunting down playtesters shortly.

I have also, by no actual effort of my own other than desultory blogging, found a Macavity Solution, in that CarloandKaren have volunteered to adopt him on the grounds of being short a ginger tom. This means we have started feeding him and encouraging him into the house, with the fell and deceptive intent of getting him relaxed and friendly so that we can swoop down, incarcerate him in a box and haul him off to a life of vet check-ups and sybaritic luxury. While he still won't let me come closer than a Jackie-length or so to him, he has progressed from pitiful yowling to actual conversational yowling if I talk to him for a while. I'm hopeful.

Subject line, as any fule kno, references Good Omens and demonic traffic possession.

My poor little Mermaid finally died. The Mermaid was, lest this sound unduly surreal, the white CitiGolf I've been driving for the last eight years or so, who earned her sobriquet from the mystic and largely inexplicable inscription on her number plate. Perhaps as a result of this she evinced an uncanny attraction to water over the time I drove her, not always with the best results given the traditional workings of the infernal combustion engine. She always had a tendency to run her cooling system dry and overheat, and over the years I've had the radiator replaced entirely, had insane quantities of water removed from the distributor cap after an unusually deep puddle experience, had water poured into my boots via the front panel as a result of rain becoming cached under the bonnet, and had the bodywork reconditioned because of the exuberant leaks which tended to manifest in jolly Cape Town storms. She finally expired a few days ago, completely in character, when the leaky head gasket I've been pussyfooting around all year got to the point where it let water into the system, and she started driving in a jerky, hiccuppy sort of way which definitely Boded. Poor Mermaid. Always yearning for the ocean in a doomed and futile sort of fashion.

So last night the nice man from Ray's magical auto-mechanic place came round, and after confirming my diagnosis ("I really shouldn't be driving her, should I?" "Uh...no.") bought her off me on the turn, pressing oodles of cash into my slightly fluttering hands, detached me from the registration papers and a receipt, and drove her, hiccuping gently, away, bound for a complete re-conditioning and resale at his capable hands. I hadn't expected it so quickly, and had to do an extremely speedy purge of the interior of all the random guff which piles up over time. (The yield: gorilla lock, mermaid charm from rear-view mirror, bottle of sunscreen, bottle of engine oil for babying the leaky head with, eight shopping bags, an exploded map book, my now entirely useless campus parking disk, a coke bottle full of water for babying the leaky cooling system with, a metric buttload of random paper bits those poor sods handout at traffic lights, five nursery plastic sheets for carrying plants on, a flourishing crop of mould in the boot, and that umbrella I thought I'd lost last winter, thus continuing the watery theme).

Watching her toddle off, I felt completely bereft. A car driven over time becomes a personality, both an organism for whose continued well-being one is responsible and a trusted compatriot who bears one's chattels and one's lazy form tirelessly about the show. Her possibly dodgy Dagon-worshipping traits aside, the Mermaid has served me faithfully; she's ported me around the city, up the campus hill daily, over the Neck repeatedly into Hout Bay to visit my father, on tarred roads and dirt, in hail and pelting winter rain and February heatwaves and those amazing Cape Town winds which try to playfully blow you off the freeway. She hasn't done much distance stuff, but has successfully ambled out to Arniston a couple of times. She had a game little heater but no air-con, the world's most terrible gearbox, and a faulty passenger-door interior handle which used to randomly entrap passengers to no discernible pattern, causing amusing levels of panicked scrabbling. (I always chose to interpret it as a sign of affection, a reluctance to relinquish the cherished passenger, but I doubt they felt it). She didn't have the personality of my Biscuit Tin, but I was fond of her, and used mutate "Mermaid" into "Merrymaid" at odd moments, and drive around singing Gilbert and Sullivan.

I feel as though I've carelessly allowed something fragile and complicated with whom I have a relationship of trust to slip out of my control. Did I damage her carelessly? Will she be OK? Will her next owner look after her properly? Shouldn't I have vetted them, like you do for dogs? Do I over-invest in inanimate objects?

So I'm carless again, and slightly tearful. Various confluences of the Cosmic Wossnames have determined that I'm trying to find myself a Toyota Yaris, if only because it narrows the field to manageable levels which stave off panic attack, and in defiance of the fact that it's a silly name. The Jo, with ineffable kindliness and self-sacrifice, has volunteered to haul me around to various auto dealers on Friday, and to pat my hand gently as I try to grapple with the technicalities of test-drives and finance and what have you. There's a sheaf of car ad printouts on my desk and a page of annoyed scrawls which determine, after horrible hold music has caused the ear-wax to melt and dribble out of my ears, that it's not going to be worth going through my bank, as they hedge their loans about with sharp stakes and unpalatable restrictions. As a result of the indefinitely-delayed adulthood occasioned by indefinite grad studenthood, this is the first time I've had to do this. I'm in a state of wibble.

However, this does mean that the state of fatigued uselessness which has dogged me for the last year and a half, may finally be lifting. The things I needed to do by the end of this year included a new car, a driver's licence and a new agent for the French house. I have a learner's, a car plan which will by gum by a car in jig time, and a contract from the new agent in my inbox. Two and a half out of three ain't bad.

This morning I woke up to thunder, and petrichor, and a tight cluster of alarmed cats around my feet. They hate the thunder, and slink through the house on a sort of ambulatory cower. I, on the other hand, drove up to work in the pelting rain laughing like a loon, and uttering little shrieks of joy every time the lightning arced across the mountain. Still a highveld girl at heart, and I miss thunderstorms on a deep and physical level which I'm only really conscious of when it actually thunders.

They're a very bodily experience, thunderstorms. Not just because the feel and the scent of heavy rain and the vibration of thunder are so deeply sensual, but because, I think, the air is so charged. I feel electric: alive and tingling. It also helps that the thunderstorm has cleared the air and cooled things down after two days of intense, sticky, ennervating heat wave, causing me to revive like my drooping and underwatered garden. If we're going to go the highveld route of heatwaves as the necessary foreplay to a climax of thunderstorm, I can endure them a lot better.

Yesterday's heatwave was also made endurable, of course, by a sumptuous champagne breakfast with jo&stv, followed by lounging in the swimming pool. Followed by lots and lots of Skyrim. Prancing around a snowy virtual landscape is probably the next best thing to actual air conditioning. My game at the moment, however, is subject to sudden rains of Stormcloak and Imperial corpses, who descend unexpectedly from thin air and thud to the ground, causing city guards to become quite naturally concerned. I'm imagining a concerted effort of giants somewhere launching them irritably into the air a long way off. Also, my dog is floating. I think the last patch broke stuff again. Sigh.

Last three days of registration to survive. Wish me luck.

You know, this planet is fundamentally screwed. It's the middle of December. (And, in related news, how the hell did that happen? I've wandered around for the last two weeks firmly convinced that it was around the 3rd of the month, and here we are with a totally unexpected public holiday to the side of the head on Friday, and Christmas itself leering just around the corner. Also, I forgot friendly_shrink's birthday, by dint of not realising the month had progressed that far. Fatigue does the weirdest things to one's perception of time.)

Anyway. It's the middle of December. We have had solid, heavy rain all morning, with a truly marvellous episode of actual hail for about fifteen minutes in the middle of it. We are supposed to be a Mediterranean climate, i.e. all about the winter rain, not the summer (see High Veld Summer Thunderstorms, Lack Of, Tragic, for the use of). If we have stuffed with this climate to the extent of hail on the 14th December, it's pretty bad. Put it together with the merry billboards advertising the US/China hijack of the climate change summit to try and weasel out of emissions accords, and it's perfectly obvious why we're doomed.

This wouldn't happen if we were all orang-utans. I bet orang-utans wouldn't feel the need to get all protective of their bloody oil-based economy.

I should point out that all of the above did not in any way prevent me from spending ten minutes this morning with my third-floor office window flung open all the way while I stuck my head out into the rain, laughing like a loon, and tried to catch the hailstones out of the air. Bits of thing falling from the sky apparently regress me to the joyous age of 8, or thereabouts. My morning was materially improved by having to comb the hailstones out of my hair before I could deal with the next dose of student angst. Strange but true.

The inexorable advance of December towards Merry Festive Wossnames reminds me that I did, in fact, send out the Great Boxing Day Braai invite a couple of days ago. If you're in Cape Town and didn't receive it but would like to attend, please leave plaintive meepings in the comments. I probably only left you out owing to cheesebrain, which I have a lot of just at the moment.

It's really cheating to garden in this climate. You fling a few seedlings into the ground, wave some compost at them in a desultory sort of fashion, douse them with water occasionally, and stand back so that the "whoosh" of vegetative life reaching for the ferocious African sun doesn't actually singe your eyebrows. I planted tomatoes less than a month ago. Behold:



This is before I went in there with a machete and a train of native bearers to hack off all but the main shoots so that some of the fruit actually gets to see the sun through the jungle, and the spring onions aren't completely overrun.

Also, I grew this pomegranate from seed, which I stuck into the soil in a waywardly experimental mood about a year ago, when a tray of supermarket pomegranate seeds in the fridge Went Bad, or at the very least set up their own illicit still. They sprouted like mad things; I've given seedlings to several people, and this one is outgrowing its pots with enough fervour that I suspect it of being part Triffid. It also looks ridiculously healthy, suggesting that it thrives on the above regimen of wholesome neglect.



Also, I love pansies. They have sweet little velvet faces, which they produce in a tasteful array of deep jewel tones which almost exactly approximate my taste in clothing colours. They're evil aliens and I thus grow them only in pots in a slightly shamefaced way, but I planted the right-hand pot in April and they've been blooming ever since, which I suspect is probably against the rules. The left-hand pot are the Next Generation, planted a few weeks ago. Anyway. They make me happy.



This post brought to you courtesy of a recent, random re-watch of Sunshine (tense, philosophical space movie that does amazing things with light and Cillian Murphy), and a major Soundgarden ear-worm which the Beatles subject line was a futile attempt at dislodging. Bugger.

This post should have a really-random-analysis red flag. You have been warned.

Trees generally are a locus of all sorts of things: beauty, dignity, age, a sort of massive calm. Tolkien's Ents are simply a vivid externalisation of the kind of awe a tree should properly engender. But more than that, a tree is a text, a solid confluence of history and context and identity as well as aesthetics.

The plane tree in our garden is an excellent example of its genre, a lovely tree in its own right - it grows tall and straight and huge, unslanted by the fierce Cape winds which push lesser trees over into tilted growth. It's our saviour in summer, shading the entire side of the house, and making the interior blissfully cool on the hottest days. The deep shade severely limits the kinds of plants I can grow in the front garden, but I consider it to be worth it. In winter the plane tree usefully loses all its leaves as well as the fuzzy bobbles of its seed heads, allowing the sunlight in to the house and grass. I am happy to allow it even that, and will cheerfully rake up the brown autumn drifts.

Trees, of course, are also about history. I have no idea how long this one has been here, but even with the relatively fast plane tree growth, it's probably a minimum of fifty or sixty years. I don't know who planted it in the corner of the garden, to provide its peaceable shade in the February heatwaves, but they were clearly a respecter of trees. I find it odd to think of these unidentified individuals experiencing the same summer heat we do, and planting a tree whose welcome dappled cool they will never actually experience. I hope they would be happy to think that we do experience it, and are grateful.

I love this tree, but it's problematical. It's an alien, not native to the Cape; while it's not the water-hog a eucalypt is, nor invasively prone to scatter its offspring everywhere, it shouldn't really be here. The plane tree originates in the northern hemisphere; ours, a stranger to the tip of Africa, is also as far as I can work out a hybrid, a London Plane, which is a cross between the oriental and American strains. I'd never want to remove it, it's a beautiful tree, but if I were to plant something now for shade and beauty, it wouldn't be a plane. Not even trees are exempt from the re-judgements of the New South Africa and the re-assessment of colonial legacies and aesthetics which make a nonsense of local ecologies. I can't look at the plane tree, or touch its strangely smooth grey bark, without feeling a complex constellation of love and guilt and unease.

They may not fling themselves spontaneously far and wide, but plane trees invade in a more conceptual sense: we plant a lot of them. There are new rows all down the road around the corner from our house, and along the main avenue on campus. This picture was taken outside my office today. When I started my undergrad here, I don't think those plane trees had been planted yet; they were put in, as spindly metre-high things, in my first couple of years of study, and my earliest sense of the avenue is as a blisteringly and uncompromisingly open, sunny space. Now we have the start of a shady, tree-lined stretch which is an enormous relief in the summer. The historicity of trees, above anything else in my life, makes me realise that I've been on this campus for over 20 years. It also makes me realise how far, even in this particularly self-consciously political space, the Afrocentric on campus is capable of being undermined by convenience. Plane trees grow quickly and look lovely, but in their leafy green between the ivy-covered stone of the buildings, we ape the English or American university rather than forging an identity of our own.

I cannot regret a tree: their presence and character, once established, make me both respectful and protective, and I will always mourn their destruction. But in this, as in all things, the fatal tendency to think means that love is never simple.

Looking at today's soft, misty, slightly relentless rain, you wouldn't believe we had our first braai of the season on Sunday night, sparked by a really indecently warm and beautiful weekend. Ah, Cape Town, how I love your cussed refusal to pay any attention to conventional seasons. Bloody-minded individualism is one of my favourite virtues. (Whoa! actually, some of that wasn't actually rain, but guys with a very long brush washing the outside of my office windows. Explains all the mad thumping sounds I've been hearing all morning.)

A slightly tragic realisation may, however, have arisen out of said Sunday braai. I'm actually quite used to the experience of staggering through a rather high proportion of Monday mornings with an epic and crippling sinus headache: we have a regular Monday morning meeting, and I tend to associate it with headaches to a statistically significant extent. I'd always put it down to (a) hangover, and (b) general resentment of Mondays. However, I really don't tipple with sufficient abandon to result in hangovers, which in any case shouldn't really infect my sinuses, and the same goes for work-loathing - tension headache, yes, sinus headache, unlikely. Sid is evil, but not that evil. No, I think it's fairly simple: I'm reacting to the wood smoke. It's inflaming my sinuses, which are merrily becoming infected and crippling me to the usual plan, with a side order of Glands. This is a horrible thing to contemplate. I'm really only an imitation South African, but I do enjoy our Sunday evening braais in summer, and resent the prospect of spending future iterations in the kitchen, with my head in a paper bag.

Truly lovely weekend notwithstanding, it's been a fairly horrible week. I am very tired and sinusy; I am enmeshed in the labyrinthine processes of insurance protocols after that stupid little accident the other week while I was so 'fluey; and I still haven't marked all these Frankenstein scripts, which seem to be multiplying on some kind of moebius principle I somewhat resent. Also, by way of a kicker, the nice agent lady in France mailed me yesterday to say that my tenants are suddenly baling after three months in the house, and that she doesn't want to carry on representing it as a rental property, it's not worth her while. She'll try and sell it for me if I want to, but no more renting. Bleah. Trying to work out if it's worth it. In French.

All this is giving me the most unlikely and (generally) horrible dreams. Night before last it was an extended cuddle session with, for some reason, Keanu Reeves, who was kinda cute, but which mostly caused angst and depression because he played mad amounts of polo and now I had to pretend to be enthusiastic about riding horses. Last night was another of those oh god I've screwed up irrevocably dreams, in this case by not realising that the man under the floorboards was there when I ran the giant machine which wound him in ropes around a floor joist and then perforated him all over with enormous sharpened metal pins. At some point he became me, and I had to watch my body slowly shredding and dissolving because of all the perforations. I'm a bit fragile this morning.

I have just discovered Irkafirka, courtesy of James Blue Cat's comfortable owl - it's a site which randomly draws pictures illustrating particularly odd and wayward random tweets. This one has just reminded me out of the blue of the Very Odd Dream I had last night about zombie arms. I think I may have been trapped in a sort of Sheridan-Lefanuesque haunted house, where people kept disappearing bloodily, including the portly older guy who went out to the outhouse, and the cute young babysitter. The slightly creepy Victorian-clad mistress of the mansion was able to keep track of who was alive and who was dead by reading a rack of blue, rotting, wrenched-off zombie arms she happened to have, possibly on a principle not unrelated to the I Ching and yarrow stalks. This caused me (who was for some reason a four-year-old child at the time) to realise that in fact she and her portly husband were the actual killers, and I cunningly hid in the roof to escape them. Fortunately I phoned the police - or possibly a posse of blonde Scooby-Doo-style investigative teens - before I did so, and they arrived just as I fell through the ceiling.

Why, yes, I am still walking in my sleep. Last night there was a giant steampunk button on the wall opposite my bed that I'd stupidly neglected to push weeks ago, and now everything I'd done didn't count.

I actually meant to post today just to show you how pretty the setting full moon was over the mountain yesterday morning. Because it was.

It's autumn. The Cape is all bracing and crisp, with a shiver in the evenings and a particular pale clarity to the sunlight. Things are dying down, tucking in for winter. Planting vegetables at this time of the year as a result of renovation delays is doomed, hopeless, will never work. Right? Yes? Right?



Um. Someone give my veggie boxes the memo. On account how how they're all going "sproing." I mean, it's a sheltered, sunny courtyard, but this is ridiculous. (That mutant squash thing is self-seeded, and has giant yellow blossoms under all those leaves).

Also, someone give Hobbit the memo that says he's not allowed on the dining room table, even through it's beautifully situated for afternoon sun.



No? Oh, well, then. At least he's decorative.