brighter brights?

the comments alone are worth the link…. 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/30/lsd_discoverer/

blah blah blog

Apparently it is bad netiquette to blog blag on about busy life, working hard, blogs in head blah blah blah so I won’t.  It’s been an almost perfect week.  Full to exhaustion with late night  chats with a visiting friend, an acupuncture session (if you haven’t you so should!), dinner out with the girls, full work days, school runs, cuddles in the evening and a Saturday of swimming, playing in Hyde park in the drizzle and dinner at wholefoods. (That foursome sitting in the chaos of spilt juice, squashed smeared food and licked clean ice-cream bowls nattering over coffee….? That was us!). Phew. Relived I still have tomorrow… for friends for lunch and my niece coming to play and my sibs coming for tea and oh shite then it all starts again.

 In fact a whole week has somehow flown by between me drafting the paragraph above and sitting down to finish the post - another week of routine week and crazy busy sessions between 6 and 8 pm and then calm time to breath, read, eat, sleep yadda yadda yadda.

I confess that I was nervous about the return to full time work. Worried about coping with full days and long nights and keeping my home ticking over comfortably. It’s been easier than I thought - easier in some ways than negotiating with a three year old all day and nice to be back in an adult environment. So ho hum so cliche I know but this is a mama blog… in transition. 

The advantages of being a full time mom?  There is no negotiating about home time - the pc goes off at 5:00pm and I am out that door - no questions asked, no raised eyebrows. The hard thing? Knowing that there is no time for slack in my day - and working through lunch everyday to keep on top of things.  The best thing about being back at work? Walking down New Bond Street every day - so the very best of London!  The best bit in my day? My daughters excited hug when I pick her up each evening and the desire to make every minute with her count. Her company suddenly so very precious.

Today I started a new yoga class.  My first class this year. 

I thought long and hard about continuing my old class - the one I have been going to almost every week for the last 8 years.  I weighed up giving up an evening with my daughter for my class and I couldn’t do it. It used to be that my yoga class was my only gift to myself each week - precious and sacred. Now it was competing head on with the Chi and  the two hours I spend with her every evening are too precious to even consider giving up. So I’ve found a later class. One that starts after the Chi is in bed.  It is a different style of yoga. Sivananda rather than Iyengar.  An intermediate class rather than an advanced practise class.  The rhythm was different.  Faster. Gentler. It somehow lacked the focus and concentration of my old class. The physical challenge.  I know it was a first class and I need to give it a chance - to make sure we are not going to be doing the same cycle of poses each week. And I may have to learn the discipline of developing my own practise again to keep the challenge going.     

Africa... why you should... (aka lazy friday night post)

 

 no words required….

eveyones a millionaire!

Zimbabwe. Home.  

Returning for the first time after four years - I couldn’t sleep. Excited. Nervous. Frightened.  Right up until that plane landed on that one single familiar stretch of runway.   Carrying my daughter through the new terminal - eyes brimming with uncontrolled emotion as I spoke to the customs and immigration officials,  my attention drawn to the distant figures I could see in the visitors gallery waiting and watching for us. Recognising from a distance my mothers small frame against my stepfathers bigger one - the curve of her shoulders, the tilt of her head, and the responding tears of joy in her eyes, in her soft hug. 

Harare was a blur, a round trip of chores that needed doing and lunch with family friends, and then the long, exhausting drive home past farm land turned fallow.  Everything the same. Everything different.  The road home felt narrower, pitted with larger potholes. The towns we passed on route smaller, frailer - unkempt. Fields that once stretched to the horizon with tilled brown earth, 6 foot maize, green gold wheat or cotton now a patchwork of subsistence strips. People desperately trying to produce enough food to feed their own family for a year.  

Arriving home was almost normal. The hidden oasis that is my mothers garden a bubble of normal ness in a disappearing world. Yet even at home there where significant signs of change.

Our old camping primus stove now handy in the kitchen. Candles, lanterns and torches conspicuous in every room ready for the daily unscheduled power cuts. The deep freeze turned into a larder for flour and other non perishables. Frozen food unable to survive 30 - 40 hour stretches with no electricity. The fridge sparse.  You cannot truly understand the emotional impact of that last sentence for me. My mothers fridge sparse.  The full to bursting family fridge we used to dive into throughout the day when I was growing up now spartan in its selection.  A small reflection of what was no longer available on the open market.

My mother lives on a small holding.  Just her vegetable garden has a footprint larger than that of the block I live in.  She grows everything. Onions, potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, lychees, mangos, mulberries, rocket, peppers, cucumbers, dill, parsley, thyme, origanum, fennel, passion fruit, plums, pomegranates, grapes, lemons, oranges. This year the olive tree we brought together in Capetown 12 years ago produced olives for the first time. What she doesn’t grow she can’t buy. Can’t choose to eat. An informal trade system exists. She send strawberries to Mrs X and gets day fresh cream in return. Ditto eggs, chicken, even meat. Have I ever told mentioned that my step dad is a butcher?!  In the time that I was there he had no meat to sell. He couldn’t source it. And if he could then government imposed price controls would dictate what he could sell it for - and in this upside down world he would have to sell it for less that it would cost him - from the state owned abattoir.

The government has imposed price controls in an effort to slow down a runaway inflation and has only succeeded in stalling the economy totally.  Shops empty of stock are forced to stay open with employees standing amongst the empty shelves because of whispered threats that the government would step in to take control of any that closed.  

Shop owners forced to sell everything they have in the store or in warehouses at fixed prices.  Regardless of what they paid for it. And some did ok out of this. I spoke to some people who succeeded in shifting stock they had brought in the 1980’s. But in the main people have lost.  People who spent illicit foreign currency to buy goods on a underground black market forced to sell them at a fraction of the cost.  And everything was brought - the rational being that it was better to convert cash into something tangible that can later be resold on the quiet for a profit.  

Wile the shops are empty informal traders stand in groups on the street and whisper as you walk on buy - “Soap - I have soap - do you want to buy?”  Goods hidden under bushes, in the drains, and surreptitiously handed over while constantly on the look out for undercover cops or the informal but more frightening “green bombers”. 

And the minimum average transaction?  $200 000.00.   

$200 000.00 for a small bottle of coke - but this can only be bought on presentation of an empty bottle as “deposit”. 

$200 000.00 for two sugar buns. You can’t buy bread as that is price controlled but “fancy buns” are unregulated and can command an inflation linked price. 

$200 000.00 for the newspaper - which for many is the cheapest /only way to stock up on toilet paper. 

It was hard to digest. Hard to accept the daily grind existence. The fatigue that was clear in every conversation I had with anyone. Everyone.

Yet the shrunken community I grew up in is tighter then it ever was. People that did not know each other 10 years ago now look out for each other in amazing and often enterprising ways. And that was uplifting. And while my mother does not have the luxury of an overstocked waitrose equivalent - she is surrounded by quiet, space, light, sun, green, and a garden that produces organic, delicious, sun ripened produce we just don’t have access to.   

I enjoyed my trip home bar one thing. One rather contentious, emotive truth that I am almost frightened to admit to in this public and anonymous forum. The “R” word.  Vile, blinkered, narrow-minded colour coded scaremongering. It’s still there. Still as, if not more, deeply entrenched than it ever was. Still as divisive. The bitter cruelness of this is heart wrenching and I fear that this is being manipulated by the existing government too - a new young generation of children are being taught a revisionist history that reinforces a counter fear and hate that can ultimately lead to more bitter tears. 

And it is ultimately the thing that most keeps me from wanting to return for longer than a fleeting visit.  

Oh my blog!

Okay, so I got back weeks ago now. 

The holiday so wonderful and the return home refreshing… if a little wet.  I think our cat missed us. 

It’s been a marathon fortnight for this household - out of the blue I returned to work - full time - at my old company - and the Chi is now in nursery all day. We survived the first week. It’s been easy, good, hard, sad, rushed and now it’s Friday night and the weekend is this bubble of time to fill and cherish. That’s the summary.

Oh and the job?  It’s not rocket science but I’m busy all day and it’s almost easier than running around after a three year old!

singing in harmony

Do you ever get the feeling that sometimes then universe just smiles with you?  When despite the blustery wet squally weather you get home where it’s warm and you feel like you’ve had a good day?

Today has been full of good things - strangers sharing a smile on the tube - the station manager who helped me carry the pram down 30 steps to the platform - the kind man who helped me carry the pram up 10 stairs to the entrance of the natural history museum - the smiles of the people in the museum as they shared the glee four young children showed at being reunited after 6 weeks - the waiter at waggamama’s who folded paper planes for them as they waited for their food - and the cleaner who laughed away our apologies at the crazy mess under our table when we left.

It was a good day.  I walked with a light heart and I looked at the early evening sky and I smiled. The days are getting longer!

do not adjust your sets...

So I haven’t written for weeks - not wanting to bore you with the trivialities of cold after flu after cold after flu that has infected our lives for the past couple of months. It’s been boring. Exhausting.  We better now thank you.

I’m going to stretch this blogging hiatus out for a couple more weeks.
I leave for Zimbabwe in the morning - and my mother doesn’t have internet connectivity.  That’s mostly because she doesn’t have electricity 95% of the time and I don’t think a cranky old generator has enough ooomph in it to power more than a couple of light bulbs and her digital tv.

My heart is racing and I know I am not really going to sleep tonight. The urge to Africa is strong and I can’t wait to blink into the yellow light and drive that familiar route home.   Can’t wait to see my mother in the arrivals hall, to hug her and feel her soft hands grip mine.  Her smell - diorissimo. To see her expression as she meets my daughter again after almost two years.

So much will have changed since I last went home. But it is home, and it is hot, and the the garden with be lush and tropical and there will be thunderstorms. 

Back in wireless land in two weeks. Until then, thanks for all the fish.  

red nosed and foggy headed!

Fucking flu!

So fucking foul it finally got me swearing on my blog cause I figure anyone who actually goggles those words isn’t looking for anything pink - unless noses rubbed raw count and that would just be a seriously bizarre fetish.

It seems like the last few weeks all I have done is deal with colds or suffer them, in the meantime winter darkness settles over London daily by 4:30pm  and all I can think is that I am so glad I am out of here for five weeks over Xmas - and even though I am heading for Zimbabwe (then SA) and all that this entails I am so looking forward to hot blue skies and my mothers garden and not having to battle a toddler that needs to run in London grey sludge and the weeks of incessant xmas adverts.  Did you know I am one of those awful Xmas humbugs?  I like the lights and tinsel just don’t give me the jingles and scrape the build up to a family lunch for goodness sake.  Brussel sprouts… bleugh!

And that is the last I shall say on this matter until next year.