Freckles & Doubt

This is a very lovely city, even when its soft grey misty clouds are a lie and a delusion and only give us a tantalising trickle of the rain we so desperately need. We are on very serious water restrictions, I shower and wash my hands to a complicated system of buckets whose collected water is ruthlessly apportioned to the garden and the loo depending on detergent quantities. The days when I could stand dreamily under the hot water for unspecified aeons while my mind drifts happily, are long gone. I am losing plants in the garden, I don't have enough water for all of them and plants in pots don't have the root access which allows them to survive reduced watering. It's all a bit dire.

My subject line is Kermit the Frog, whose gentle optimism I do not currently feel.

Among the myriad ills my particular flesh is heir to, alongside dodgy knees, dodgy sinuses, stress-eczema, "really terrible breasts" and fatigue-with-glandular-wossname, is the lurking existence of moles. I have millyuns of moles. Seriously, I've never actually counted, but when the nice dermatologist lady mapped them last year there must have been over twenty which were significant enough to record. I am Heavily Dotted. There are whole constellations all over my back, and minor outbreaks on my arms and legs. I had a boyfriend once who used to get really stoned and play join-the-dots. I've mostly cordially ignored the moles, and they've got on quietly with their inoffensive high-pigmentation existences, occasionally appearing or disappearing to their own cryptic timetables, but they do have the potential to Turn Nasty, hence the mapping. Which, I have to add for the record, is another of those high-tech sciency things which is really cool, all computerised and dedicated-software and high-tech cameras, and more than compensates for the demoralising experience of seeing one's own flabby bod photographically exposed in high definition. (Moles are really odd in high detail close-up, incidentally. All patchy and constellated and complicated).

So, there are two potentially dodgy moles on my left thigh. The nice dermatologist lady ruthlessly excised them two weeks back, and sent them off for biopsy, leaving me with two cauterised raw patches, a slight smell of scorched flesh and a minor outbreak of dermatitis from reaction to the plasters. According to the biopsy, one mole is fine. The other is apparently edging into the territory where "non-standard melanocytic nevus" becomes "potentially moving into possible Stage 0 melanoma". This is all terribly potential and pre-emptive, but the standard, slightly "nuke them from orbit" response is to re-excise both of them for good measure, taking out an additional half-centimetre of flesh all round. This leaves slightly more of a crater than the original surface excision, requiring stitches and what have you, and the procedure is performed by a plastic surgeon. The plastic surgeon in question is a lovely man, if completely insane and more than a little manic, and we had a lovely chat about the way he proposes to pump me full of rohypnol-like drugs which don't actually knock me out, but, in his words, "scramble your memories". You experience the pain, apparently, you simply don't remember it. I'm fine with this, surprisingly. Also with his confirmation of my personal sense that all anaesthetists are, in fact, insane. Which in my experience they have been.

So tomorrow I'm in hospital briefly, having moles subdued. Or, more accurately, pursuing a scorched earth policy on the area where moles have been subdued. This is minorly off-narking in view of the fact that I'd actually already applied for leave for actual holiday/break purposes before being told I needed this procedure, but hopefully I can re-purpose the leave. By way of consolation, Cape Town continues to be blissfully cool and damp, signalling that Autumn, thank FSM, is Here. Also, beautiful clouds. This was yesterday evening, at Claire's for Sherlock-watching and crispy duck with pancakes. While the speckled pattern on the clouds reminds me irresistibly of mole close-ups, I have to admit that life, despite having its moments of complexity just now, is certainly not uniformly bad. (The new season of Sherlock is not uniformly bad either, but I have Notes which I shall certainly develop at some length in a subsequent post).

My subject line is Spike Milligan, whose Cheetah is relevant on account of being heavily dotted and easily spotted. I do not, in fact, live in Tanganyika. I don't think I've ever visited, even, the closest I've come is Malawi or Mozambique. I do, however, rather like cheetahs.

I am not, alas, of the cellphone generation. My phone is not a prosthetic limb, it's an occasionally useful communication device on which I probably receive more spam/sales calls than social ones. I am capable of, as I did this weekend, turning it off for a meeting on Friday morning, and suddenly and vaguely recollecting its existence on Sunday afternoon, at which point it had accumulated about eight texts and missed calls, and had caused me to leave hanging several people who were trying to visit. For which, my apologies. Note to readers: I am very firmly of the internet generation, and will infallibly read email way before I'll remember to look at my phone.

It also has a camera. I occasionally remember this, and occasionally take photos with it, and then completely forget that I've done so, until the guilt at not looking at the damned thing for three days prompts me to dig around in its innards in a spirit of enquiry and reveals all sorts of images going back months.

This was taken at the Kingston-on-Thames conference, and is a rather conflicted combination of a truly beautiful river-surmounting evening sky rendered generally exquisite by London's insane and terrifying density of aircraft vapour trails, the contemplation of which invariably gives me a punch to the solar plexus with eco-fear.



This is a stitched composite which has a chunk missing as I apparently didn't take any photo which covered that patch of sky; however, it gives a much better sense of that amazing repeated bow effect than the better but narrower stitch which is also on my Flickr.

... on account of how the four-day weekend seems to have shut down every last facsimile of brain in my skull, leaving me just enough to read, play computer games, drink and cook huge meals (roast chikkin and a multitude of veg. for the jo&stv, also muchly booze and hilarity), but precious little in the way of coherent sentence formation. Instead, this is a sort of postcard. More dusky mountain shots.



The dawn/dusk setting on this camera is purple. Extremely purple. Be the evening never so red and gold, it'll record it as purple. I think it's a frustrated poet of the more torrid and indigo sort. Anyway, this shot courtesy of pulling up a red traffic light on the way to a supper date and saying to the Evil Landlord, who was driving, "aarghquickwindowquickgivemefullwindow!" while scrabbling in my handbag for my camera. (His automatic window controls are broken and can only be operated by the driver, usually to the accompaniment of manic, Evil Overlordian laughter. Never give full control to a German). The evening was sort of blue/grey, but the camera, despite the overly purple wash, has the soft, teased solidity of the cloud formations absolutely correct.

Cape Town is still vascillating about all this spring/summer nonsense. Yesterday was muted and misty, with beautiful clouds.



(a) this camera apparently takes photos straight in to the semi-occluded sun with reasonable grace, and (b) that darned Egyptian goose is back on its chimney-pot perch again. (And, apparently, headless).

Other than that, being as how the insomnia levels are making it difficult even to enthuse about Torchwood, I got nuttin'.

Cape Town weather is always a bit weird, but at the moment it's truly weird. Last week was freezing cold and rainy. This weekend was warm. Berg wind warm. Muggy, humid warm with a side order of a mini-thunderstorm on Sunday morning. It's not bloody winter at all. Rotten swizz, if you ask me. On the upside, the weather forecast promises rain this week, and an "upper perturbation" on Thursday. I'm all excited. (Actually, they promise an "upper pertubation" - I'm not sure if this is a spelling mistake or a technical weather term).

Also, the clouds over the weekend were particularly beautiful. This shot taken Saturday evening, returning from my daily dose of having my ankles affectionately head-butted, aka feeding jo&stv's cats.



Other than weird weather I spent the weekend more or less horizontal, owing to exhaustion. Today's forecast: a bright, sunny outlook upon awakening is already starting to cloud over, and prospects will worsen throughout the day until a deep trough of tiredness causes a complete collapse around 3pm, right in the middle of a university exams committee meeting in which I will be entirely eclipsed by a thicket of Deputy Deans. Memo to self: doctor's appointment, eftsoons and right speedily. Bored now.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was helping my mother pack up the kitchen (full of random broken gadgets) in order to relocate from our island beachfront home. Then I was living in a garret in a faintly Victorian city, sneaking around backstage at a theatre, and trying to avoid the persistent swarm of black bugs tracking me as I flew through the city. I fiendishly overcame them on a legal loophole by virtue of the fact that my feet never actually touched the ground.

Gawsh. There are blisters on the soles of my feet, burns on my fingers and a sort of aching exhaustion in every bone of my body. It must have been a major SCA event. Have been cooking, or performing associated heavy lifting, since Thursday lunchtime. Am dead. On the upside, it was a good event, and the Shire evinced a gratifying tendency to enthusiastically inhale the pear cheesecake. On the downside, I got back at lunchtime today and have been marking *7%%^#&%^ essays all afternoon. The deadness is not assisting.

Two random happinesses which have resulted from this particular excursion:

1. In the supermarket on Thursday, while standing meditatively in the vegetable aisle contemplating the theoretical quantity of baby marrow likely to be consumed by 27 people as one fifth of a second course, a little old lady, of the tiny, genteel, birdlike variety, all pearls, immaculate white hair, and high Edwardian necklines, accosted me politely.
"Does that say R19.99 per kilogram?" she asked sweetly, indicating the superbly overpriced tomatoes blushing on an adjacent shelf.
"Indeed it does," I confirmed, switching my attention momentarily away from marrows.
"Well, stuff them!" she chirped. Then she gave this marvellously wicked and conspiratorial giggle, like a well-behaved schoolgirl who's suddenly been offered alcohol and sex by the curate they've been crushing on, and toddled demurely away.
I think I want to be one of those when I grow up. Except the word will be considerably more Anglo-Saxon than "stuff".

2. I'd forgotten how much I loved driving on the open road. I was alone in the car (except for food and cooking paraphernalia), and she went like a bomb. The trip up was in heavyish rain, fog and darkness, which for some bizarre reason I really enjoyed. The trip back was on a beautiful day, through the lovely scenery around Sir Lowry's Pass. I passed three Mercedes, two big gas-guzzling 4x4s, and a truly irritating road-hogging dude in a BMW convertible. It's a fortunate thing my car doesn't go any faster, I suffer from an unregenerate urge to drive like a bat out of hell. But it was one of those fated, magical trips, where speed and scenery coalesce into this little moving bubble of happy being.

My dad has been a maddened falconer since early youth, and exhibits a worrying tendency while driving to crane his neck out the window to look for falcon nests on passing stretches of likely cliff. I have a sort of weird semi-inheritance of this trait, except I crane my neck while driving to look at particularly spectacular displays of clouds. On extreme occasions, I celebrate the freedom of driving alone by stopping the car to randomly photograph them. Then I blog the result.

Someone let loose a really bad fantasy artist on Cape Town's sky this evening. It's all purple and pink, with clouds that are either fluffy, wispy or feathery, with occasional gilding. The light is gold. I swear, at any moment a herd of pearly white unicorns are going to come dancing through. Probably with hearts on their bottoms. Apart from the fact that anyone wantonly perpetrating the above skyscape in cold blood would be taken out back of the artist's convention and shot, it's stunningly beautiful.

In other news, last night I dreamed I was extensively kissing Dominic Monaghan. (Which is better than Ian McKellan, but still not a patch on Scroob, who apparently rates a nocturnal George Clooney). For some reason, ridiculous quantities of spit were involved. Possibly all this Lost is rotting my brain.

Clouds are deeply happy-making, and can be swopped with fellow cloud-fanciers like stv.

Word clouds are also vaguely interesting. (Or they were, once I'd googled the hell out of them). A word cloud for this blog looks like this:



There's a lot to be said for the representative power of randomness, which I suppose explains a lot about things like astrology and tarot.