Supper in the kitchen

On nights when a chilly breeze blows on the patio, we have dinner at the kitchen table. Candles are added so that we don't sit in a glare of overhead lights. The kitchen table blossoms under tablecloth and silver, so different from its cluttered state during the day, when it holds bowls of fruit, newspapers, a cat, a handbag, groceries. It looks all grown up.

Occasionally Wellington, the one remaining mobile cat, reminds us that he actually eats his meals here during the day and does not see why he should not join us for dinner.

Tomorrow we head far, far north. We fly from the very first suggestions of autumn in Cape Town (that chilly breeze) to the beginning of spring in New York. We will leave behind these daily shared meals with my parents, kind friends, conversations with Tipsy, the garden of birds and flowers, the friendly dogs and the two cats who are perhaps not going to be here next time; and we will leave the easy access to beautiful beaches and mountain, wild flowers on our doorstep, and delicious coffee everywhere. Leaving is very sad.

So it is back to the terrace. I imagine that the chives and tarragon are up, and that the roses are thinking about making leaves. Estorbo will be fat. I am glad he is there to meet us.

Yesterday I processed the final cut of pictures chosen for the story about 66 Square Feet in Visi Magazine's April edition, and lived through them a year on the terrace. An eight page spread of memories and inspiration and two pictures of Don Estorbo himself. The layout looks lovely and it is very exciting to see it all in a magazine I have admired since it was first published.

So. See you in New York.

Coffee and a rusk

The morning after...

No matter what came before, what adventures, fair or foul: coffee galloping over the Cadac gas flame, milk heating, the rusk packet rustling...all is restored and brought to a moment of peace. Koffie en beskuit. Coffee and rusks.

Over how many hundreds of years has this started the day for a people who evolved from colonizers and native peoples, who took root, who took a stand and who then took too much?

I just learned that my father's father lost three sisters in English concentration camps, to disease and malnutrition. His brother Daniel was, at 12, apparently the youngest Boer prisoner of war, sent to Ceylon for riding commando.

Monkey see, monkey do. The abused is the abuser. The oppressed becomes the oppressor. One can't help thinking of the rise of the Third Reich as a response to the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Or of children who see their mother beaten or humiliated, who go on to beat and humiliate their women and wives, their own children.

You see what coffee and rusks can do? I think it's the dunking needed to soften what Vince describes as "a biscuit resembling pieces of old castle wall." Time for contemplation.

Then you bite your rusk, taste the wonderful combination of biscuit and coffee, and it all vanishes like a mirage. There are weaver birds at your feet...

... and night insects resting in the trees, innocuous in daytime, fearsome in the dark.

And the sun is rising, reflected from the puddles of rain left by a storm in the night.

The day has started, and the road awaits.

Breakfast

My cousin Andrea had the clever idea of meeting for breakfast. I decided to cook it, instead of going out. I think breakfast is one of the best parts of the day, but seldom enjoy it as a meal. It's usually coffee and a roll, or toast, for me, and having a proper breakfast is a real treat.

Beautiful figs are in season at the moment: deep purple skins and bright red inside with a slightly tart flavour after the sweetness. They are perfect, I think.

But the main event was a cheese souffle with crispy, herbed bacon on the side (I baked it in a roasting pan with thyme, savoury and parsley). Plus croissants (Woolworths croissants are the best I've had: they import them from France, the pastry frozen), apricot jam and farm butter, coffee and passion fruit juice.

Souffles are not difficult to make, despite their reputation, and frankly, I think its easier to produce one souffle than several perfectly poached or fried eggs. Or maybe I'm delusional. It is entirely likely that I was ratty around the time the souffle was on the table waiting to be eaten. Souffles don't like to wait.

I used Elizabeth David's cheese souffle recipe from French Provincial Cooking, and doubled it so that it was enough for four. She also writes a very good introduction to souffle-making in general.

As we sat under the awning on the patio a fine mist of rain fell, and my mother bolted her breakfast before heading into the garden to work in the cool after the serial heat waves that Cape Town has been melting through. Autum is a-coming.

Cape Argus Pick n Pay Cycle Tour 2010

Above: shadow cyclists on the M3.

As I write, Vincent Mounier and Henri Viljoen are slogging it out on the Cape Peninsula in freshening winds promising a blow of 60km an hour. Their group left at 8.02 am. Groups of 600 cyclists each are penned for release at two minute intervals. There are reportedly 35,000 cyclists riding today. The 109km tour is the largest timed race in the world.

The event has already been won by 36 year old South African Malcolm Lange *in a time of 2 hours 39 minutes 55 seconds. Lance Armstrong came in 9th, positioning team mate, South African Daryl Impey, for 3rd.

My 77 year old dad and my husband are looking at times of 4-6 hours. Many will finish in 8. My father has been training for months for this event, and just one week ago was knocked off his motorbike by a car, suffering a spectacular bruise (which he enjoys showing to people) to his right shoulder, but breaking nothing. Some of you might remember that he was hit by a car while training for this race three years ago. That put him out of commission entirely with internal bruising and torn ligaments. He was a black bruise from torso to thigh.

Vince the runner has had an impressive 3 training rides in one week, after deciding spontaneously to join my father, and he is on my dad's mountain bike, for his presumed sins. My mother and I positioned ourselves on a bridge over the M3 freeway and I managed to see Vince cycling on the shoulder and waving helpfully to separate himself from the crowd, and I bellowed Vive La France! at him.

There are cyclists unable to ride today. At least 3 have been killed training for this race and one is in an induced coma, after having been hit by cars in accidents near dawn.

Maybe the bug will bite me. But where will I train? Round and round Prospect Park? Check back this time next year...

So. Vive La France! En Vat Hom Fluffy!

Update @ 12.22pm: according to the television commentator Phil Liggett the wind did not blow as expected. "It is now an idyllic Cape day."

Update on the update @3.04pm: my dad says, Rubbish. [The wind] was nightmarish. A woman ahead of me was swept off her bicycle by the wind on Chapman's Peak. And people were again blown off their bikes at the start.

Anyway, they're back, in one piece. Vince's verdict? Never again. My father's verdict? If it blows like that again I'll take the turn-off to Constantia and go home...

I'm not so sure about that.

You can read Vince's account here.

Vince's time: 5 hours 20 minutes.
HPV's time: 5 hours 49 minutes.

* 3/15/10 - Malcom Lange obviously didn't get the memo telling him that the Cape Argus Pick 'n Pay Cycle Tour is a CHARITY race. He says, on Twitter, that his R16,000 prize is 'a joke'.

"What a joke 40000 riders and sponsorship for this race and guess what I won R16000, something does not balance???"

"So take R16000, less 10% for management and then split that by 8 riders(team), and I made R1800 for winning the Argus!!"

If his team didn't like the prize money, why ride?

International Year of Biodiversity

Above: Mimetes hirtus, Cape Point

The University of British Columbia's Botanic Garden (UBCBG)'s Botany Photo of the Day Flickr group is honouring the theme of biodiversity by dedicating each month's photographic contributions to a certain aspect of biodiversity. I intend to be active in April: Urban Biodiversity!

If you are a plant geek and/or like taking pictures, it's a very interesting group (and the plant forums of the UBCBG are incredibly helpful for all sorts of botanical questions). You can also subscribe to the daily photo from them and have it pop up on your blog in the sidebar, or receive it in email. It's not that user-friendly at the moment and I'll post a link if I can figure one out.

Back to Flickr: administrator Daniel Mosquin says:

To help celebrate 2010's Int'l Year of Biodiversity (IYB), we've set up thematic months for educational programming at UBC Botanical Garden. We'd like that to spill over into BPotD as well, so to that end, here are the monthly themes and suggested tags if you want to make things really easy for us as we put together week-long series for each theme:

J: Resolutions for Biodiversity - iybjan
F: Biodiversity and Sports - iybfeb
M: Biodiversity and the North - iybmar
A: Urban Biodiversity - iybapr
M: Biodiversity & Botanical Gardens - iybmay
J: Biodiversity and Culture - iybjun
J: Biodiversity of the Pacific Northwest - iybjul
A: Biodiversity of China - iybaug
S: Tropical Biodiversity - iybsep
O: Biodiversity and Food -iyboct
N: Biodiversity and Health - iybnov
D: Biodiversity Inspirations - iybdec

You'll find some discussion and clarification here.

This month's theme is Northern Biodiversity, but here I think I have an example of Southern Biodiversity:

Interestingly, I had never seen a mimetes in bloom before. I caught a glimpse of this one's flame colour as we drove through Cape Point back from Dias Beach one day. Some people look for animals. I look for flowers. A bit of careful bundu bashing (or bending in this case) led us to a little seep area, then pond, and there were these two huge, flourishing, gorgeous shrubs. Frogs clicked and krieked from the water, grasses waved and a sugar bird darted past. A tourist bus buzzed by, oblivious, racing to the Point itself, to disgorge its occupants to point and shoot, and buzz back again.

I think they miss the point entirely. The point is to stand still and listen. And look. Because then you see.

Collared by the Law

When Vince pulled over smartly on the main road of Beaufort West on a stultifyingly hot afternoon and said, Cops, I knew exactly what the problem was.

I don't even know what we were doing in town. Shopping. What could we possibly have needed on our second day out of Cape Town? Beaufort West is just a stone's throw from the gates of the Karoo National Park, where we were camping. Shampoo. I had forgotten it. And we had left our special he and she soaps (for he and she ablution blocks) in Cape Town, too. So we needed to be clean.

As the cops walked over in that deliberate cop way I thought of everything that could go wrong. I should have been driving so that I could lull them with my Free State-intoned Afrikaans. Vince doesn't sound local. He sounds like fresh tourist meat. They wouldn't like our American and Canadian driver's licenses. They would suggest bribes.

I hissed at Vince, It's the platessssss.

The number plates. I told my father. I told him a hundred times. He is a man with excellent judgement in so many areas, but he has this weakness. He likes fancy number plates. So the 4x4 we were driving - his - had a font deemed illegal by South African road standards, kind of pointy and effete at the angles, and the arrangement of numbers was in two's, with no dashes. On a yellow background. All wrong.

Illegal.

They're staying, he said, I like them.

You don't want illegal plates in a country where you can be pulled off the road for this offence and subjected to the whims of a bored, underpaid and ill-educated traffic cop in the middle of nowhere. You just don't. I'd had to go through this before in the same car and was let off by a very kind Xhosa cop in the Northern Cape; kind because I was not carrying my license at the time, either. That was luck. You don't test it.

On this day the lady cop said in Afrikaans to Vince, This is a routine stop, Meneer. The plates on Meneer's car are illegal.

Vince handed her all the paperwork on the car, including letter of permission, in response. Time to switch to English.

Ah.

Yes, we said. We knew the plates were illegal. My father's plates, he likes them. What can we do?

You can remove them and give them to me, she said. Because if you don't, she said, your father will just put them back on.

True.

We were to be given a summons, and would have to drive around without plates until they could replaced.

I explained that we had a long way to go, and that we would now be pulled off by every cop who saw us, sans plates. Would her summons explain our case to them?

She thought for a bit. Conferred with her colleague. Ok, she says, Follow me and I will take you to a place where you can get legal plates. It's too difficult to explain how to get there. I will waive the summons.

Wow. Off the hook.

So much for my preconceptions.

They spun a U-turn in the middle of town, so we did too, and followed meekly, the car now naked, the bystanders (it's a very small town) and panhandlers watching our departure wistfully.

We got new plates, and I wondered (not so fleetingly) whether the cops got a cut from the shop. The guy said he'd had 3 customers just that morning, at R200 a pop.

A chatty and completely but innocuously insane man off the street talked to Vince unintelligibly through it all. One of just dozens of loungers and strollers and hustlers on the streets with no employment and apparently no prospect of any, ever. I gave him a tip. He walked off, chatting happily to himself. The shadow of intense poverty fell over our whole trip.

Good to go. I was so happy to have these. More appropriate, I felt. In keeping with what this truck is, which is a worker, not a wuss. And she/he proved it, later, by saving our bacon.

We drove carefully out of hot, dusty Beaufort West, with our shampoo, soap, and number plates.

My dad called as we entered the park gates again. Uh oh, I thought - he's heard... How?! But no. He was calling to tell us to dump our stash of 12 bottles of wine before we entered Lesotho.

Why? I asked.

Because it's illegal to take it over the border, he said.

__________________

(He was right. And we did dump - rather, hide - the wine. Beside a stream in the Eastern Free State. And retrieved it intact the next day.)

7 days (left) in Cape Town

Karoo National Park (digitally stitched panorama). Photo: Vincent Mounier

If you're wondering what happened to the rest of the tale of the trip we just took across the country, it's coming. It just needs a bit more time for sorting through pictures.

And Cape Town is a bit distracting. With the clock ticking on our departure, we've gone into overdrive to see and do what we haven't seen and done. And eaten.

Vince has been training for Sunday's Argus Pick n Pay Cycle Tour (which in 109 km takes in the whole Cape peninsula) along with 35,000-plus other cyclists from home and abroad.

In the meantime he has some 180' panorama shots on his blog, a taste of what we will both write about next. Their beauty and diversity make me nostalgic for the road, the autonomy of driving around with everything you need in the car, the independence, the release from the kind of worries I had not realized I was carrying with me.

As for my telling of it, we ended in the Karoo, from dawn to dusk, and we still have a long way to go. Stick with me. We'll get there.