Happy Christmas

Wishing you all a wonderful and joyful Christmas time!

This picture sums up a summer Christmas for me. A miniscule smidgen of cake consumed alongside copious slices of watermelon for a late tea, followed by a gentle stroll around the farm just after the sun had gone down. It was cool enough to have a hot Christmas lunch with roast potatoes, bread sauce and the whole caboodle, so we indulged mightily until we could scarcely move. I'm happy to say that we managed to make more inroads into the cake this morning, with the help of visiting family, and are dealing well with the leftovers.

The fridge should be nice and empty by the time we go off on holiday on Sunday. A week away at a house in Knysna, near beaches, lagoons and boats and more family... then two days on safari, for our first time ever, all courtesy of my mother who is staying with us now. We have to pack lightly with six of us in the car, but I'm going to find room for some of the art materials that I got for Christmas and have a play with paints and pastels.

The children got Twister for Christmas and so are now in a tangled heap on the ground, amid constructions of 'Planx' (another present that Dad has also been enjoying), and wearing sparkly princess jewels and dresses (not Dad though).

The star on top of the Christmas tree is bowing lower as the tree wilts slightly in the dry air. We'll leave it up when we go and come back to a needleless tree skeleton probably, but it would be too sad to take it down so soon. We get back on the 6th, so it will be the first thing we do when we come home, putting away the decorations and sweeping every last needle out of the house on the last day of Christmas.

In case I don't get back to my blog before then I'll say Happy New Year now too. May it be peaceful, prosperous and full of happy surprises!

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Christmas Trees

At last I am starting to feel a bit Christmas-y. It's the scent of pine that does it. First of all we cut some branches of a wonderful, almost lemoney smelling, pine for the children's nativity scene, which has taken over the fireplace. It's way too hot to gather around a log fire here, so the fire place has been turned into a stage for Mary and Joseph, who are tortuously making their way day by day, painfully slowly, to the stable at the front. An angel is sitting on the roof with the baby Jesus. The plan was to suspend her from a wire on the chimney, which needed Dad's expertise to attach, and then lower her a tiny bit every day until she alighted on the roof on Christmas Eve. But she is quite happy lolling on the roof with the babe in her arms and Dad has been busy on other things, so there she has stayed throughout Advent.


We chose our tree carefully from the ones flourishing at the back of the farm. There were loads of big ones and loads of tiny self-seeded baby pines, but it took us ages to find a good shaped tree the right size this year. In the end we decided on a siamese twin tree. Two trees had grown so close together that they made one tree, so we cut them together and they are now looking festive, if slightly drunken from some angles.

The two dolls houses both got a tree this year. There were so many seedlings that we just pulled a couple up for the doll's house family to celebrate with.



We had our Summer festival yesterday, which was lovely, so now there is nothing else between now and Christmas. I anticipate a flurry of making marzipan and icing the cake, wrapping presents, painting the rest of my presents and finishing off last bits of work.

The other Christmassey scent of smoked gammon, which has been tantalising me every time I open the fridge, will pervade the whole house on Christmas Eve, when I am going to cook the hams, mingling with clove notes and cidery fumes, and we'll have them cold with salads and cold turkey on the day itself. Cinnamon will find its way into the couscous salad, aslo filled with mang and toasted almonds, so those traditional spices redolent of Christmas will still get a look in despite the hot weather.

Hope you are all having a wonderful lead up to Christmas!

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Christmas Heat

Feeling Hot hot hot!
It’s 38 degrees C out there and was hotter yesterday – summer has come blasting in, making it hard to think of Christmas. Baking and spicy scents of cinnamon pervading the house just don’t really work when you are melting in the shade. Candles, firelight and warming spiced food are so much part of the Christmas atmosphere to me that it is hard to get in the mood sometimes.

Christmas carols waft through the house, shimmering like snowflakes: ‘earth stood hard as iron, frosty wind made moan’. They demand huge leaps of the imagination, as we swelter in T-shirts trying to think of a Christmas present to make that does not involve sewing felt – just thinking about felt makes me hot.

Christmas as a hot weather festival hasn’t really made it into my sub-conscious – here people take off for the beach and have big barbeques for Christmas, but it just don’t feel right to me! I need turkey and ham, Christmas cake and mince pies, candles and frosty carols... here’s wishing for cooler weather, so I can restore the illusion of Christmas festivities for my inner child!

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Camping Rediscovered - Part 2

My husband is fond of quoting his father’s adage “Any fool can be uncomfortable”. This means that camping for him is not a matter of roughing it, but more about assembling the barest minimum of comforts and then adding some more. As we are at the beginning of our camping career we haven’t got anything like the amount of equipment that would create a home from home, and not enough space in the car to transport it. Last weekend though our friends had suggested a weekend foray to a beautiful place in the mountains that we’d heard about from all and sundry, and rashly we agreed to go even though end of term madness was in full flow.


So into the car went the tent that their aunt had just bought for the children for Christmas in honour of the class camp. Out went the borrowed family-size tent that took up half the luggage space in the car and didn’t allow room for the foam mattresses. Back in went the mattresses taking up 2/3 of the available space. A mental shopping list was started there and then: item number 1 – blow up mattresses.

An ill-timed stop off in our local town to buy rolls for lunch and a camping lamp delayed our journey a bit – it happened to be the last Saturday of the month, when the whole world flocks to town and queues at the cashpoints to draw out their wages, then potters through the super-markets en famille.

However the mountains aren’t too far away for us – only and hour and a half, so a game of I-spy and a packet of Sugus (Opal fruit type sweets) was enough to get us there fairly painlessly.


And the reward was the wonderful view from our tent.



Mountain rock pools, with accommodating tadpoles willing to be caught and relocated, cool breezes and sunshine, shady trees in a space a long way from anywhere much. All those rocks and mountain streams created a powerful energy – peaceful and deep.


Older bones are less resilient than they used to be and sleep harder won these days. The foam mattresses weren’t quite thick enough to make-up for the sounds of late-night revelers nearby; for Youngest, nappy free at last, who didn’t make it through the night and had to move into Dad’s sleeping bag half way through; for the barking dogs, which belonged to the campers who had set up their tent next to the ablution block and which decided that it belonged to them, defending it volubly against any night-time wanderers in search of the toilets; for the guinea fowl, who provided an resounding dawn chorus in the trees close by. If you have never heard guinea fowl, think peacocks, or roosters that are off-key and competing with each other – they are Loud. Nature in the raw also provided backing vocals by the Haadedaas, whose strident call sounds like the name they bear.

A rather grumpy set of adults emerged to greet the stunning dew splashed view of the sunrise. The list of essential shopping before the next camping foray grew longer: chairs; a second tent for Mum and Dad to sleep alone; extra thick blow-up mattresses; ear-plugs.

Tea and rusks in early morning sunshine helped restore a little equilibrium and the children had a great time, plus it is a beautiful place that we would like to go back another time to explore some more. But in the end the best thing about camping is the wonderful night’s sleep that you get, when you arrive home exhausted from fresh air and sleep deprivation, to crash out at 8.30 in the comfort of your own bed and sleep without stirring until morning!

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Camping Rediscovered - Part 1

This has been a week of discovering the joys and discomforts of camping. Having never spent a night under canvas since my teens, I suddenly had two consecutive bookings for a night out in nature.

The first was my son’s class camp, that I was inveigled along to, as a parent helper: a night away with 24 kids and only just enough tents at a campsite on the beach, with 30 loaves of bread and a ton of sausage to sustain us.


It was a beautiful campsite, literally on the beach, with flat grassy lots to pitch our tents and an ablution block with hot running water – luxury compared with the camping of my youth, which was more of the scout camp, roughing it variety.

All I had to do was keep an eye on the kids and make sure that none of them headed out to sea, help pitch tents, which are a whole lot easier to put up these days than I remembered, with their pop up poles and so on.; plus try my hand at lighting the fire and braaiing half the shed-load of sausage that fond parents had sent along to make sure their cherished offspring wouldn’t starve.


My husband is usually the one to braai in our house, as a good South African male - it is a gender thing! But I hadn’t watched in vain and managed to produce a decent fire and cook the sausage without charring it too much. One tent had been forgotten at home and another turned out not to have the right poles, so the boys were re-allocated six to a tent, fitting in like sardines in a tin.


With the beach right there at hand we hardly had to organise any activities at all - they went from collecting crabs and coralling them with seaweed, to making kelp horns, to fishing, to splashing in the chilly water, to playing cricket and finding starfish. The girls, on the verge of adolescence, seemed to dive into the showers at every opportunity and spend ages in their tents eating chips and trying on make-up, until chased back out onto the beach, turning back into children again as they splashed in the water and dug in the sand.


I had a foreshadowing of what it will be like in a couple of years when Middle Daughter reaches that age and wanted to stop the clock and make these childhood years last longer...


A day full of unremitting sun and salt exhausted them enough for them to sleep eventually, once scary stories had been told and screeched over, until their teacher patrolled the tents to quiet the chatter at 10 o’clock. I managed to find a reasonably comfortable sleeping position on my foam mattress and the sound of the waves on the shore lulled me to sleep too, though dawn broke far too soon.

I felt sorry for the young couple who had set up camp on a deserted site earlier that day only to have us arrive and shred the peace and quiet with girly screeches and boyish hollering, as the bunch of 10 and 11 year-olds took over the air waves. They were up at dawn packing up their tent and trying to get a recalcitrant bakkie started, and I watched them push start it with a slightly guilty feeling, while I endlessly stirred a pot of 30 eggs in an attempt to scramble them for breakfast without burning them into an inedible mess.

A sunburned lip was my souvenir of the trip – Botox for free – plus a fine collection of shells. Our son brought home about forty stones he’d collected on the beach, weighing down his rucksack until it could hardly be lifted, plus sunburnt feet and backs of legs that made him tired and cranky on the second morning. I was relieved that we were having one night at home in our own beds before setting off on out first ever family camping trip.

Part 2 tomorrow, when far less sleep was had by all!

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WTSIM Sunday Roast

The scent of roast chicken wafts through the house – the reassuring smell of Sundays, leisurely family days spent at home, everyone doing their own thing in different directions until lunch gathers them around the table. One nose buried deep in a book, another child intent on an elaborate game with toys and animals, another off at an aunt’s house until recalled for the meal. Sunday lunch is a family ritual that holds fast through winter, but loses ground to Saturday evening braais in summer, when just the thought of a roaring stove at midday would bring you out n a sweat.

Johanna announced the roast for the theme of this month’s WTSIM and I wondered whether the weather would allow me to sneak one last roast in before summer took hold. Luckily this weekend was sunny but not too hot, with a cool wind that dissuaded the children from swimming, so last week’s summer braai by the pool has been followed by a return to a wintry Sunday lunch round the table.

Crispy roast potatoes are the draw card in our house – even without the meat the kids would be happy with a plateful of them. The meat can be chicken or lamb, we hardly ever do beef or pork. This week it was a chicken: lemon-scented, a whole lemon in its cavity keeping it fresh and juicy as it cooks and preventing it from drying out; a clove or two of garlic and some herbs underneath it, with a quartered onion or two grouped around in the tin and a liberal splash or olive oil to anoint the skin. The lemon makes sure there are plenty of juices (don’t forget to pierce the lemon skin) and the onions caramelize to give a wonderful rich colour and flavour to the resulting gravy. One tip I learned from Marcella Hazan is to start the chicken off breast down in the pan, so the lemon juice soaks it and the underside browns, then turn it over for the second half of cooking. It doesn't keep so perfectly shaped but it really does taste better.

Besides the chicken and potatoes we always do a tray of baked butternut, sprinkled with cinnamon and just catching at the edges for a sweet caramelly taste. Some fresh steamed vegetables are needed to offset all this roast richness, something green like broccoli and some carrots or peas.

Roasts are simple enough, once you have mastered the rhythm. Most of the work is in the preparation: peeling and par-boiling the potatoes, anointing the chicken with whatever oils and herbs you’ve chosen, peeling and dicing the butternut. Then you can shove it all in the oven for an hour and a half and leave it to cook, just checking in a couple of times to turn the potatoes and butternut and baste the chicken. Too much attention and you let all the heat out of the oven, losing the necessary degrees to achieve crispness and perfection. At the end there is another flurry of activity, draining vegetables and making gravy, carving the meat. The potatoes stay in the oven until the last minute, so they are as crisp and crunchy as possible and don’t sit sulkily in their bowl going soggy in their steam, while people are called to the table.

I have written a whole article on the perfect roast potato, so I won’t repeat the secret here and anyway, everyone has their own pet way of getting them just right, from Nigella Lawson’s semolina to those who swear by using goose fat for flavour. Mine just require short par-boiling, a shake in the pan to rough the corners and just enough hot olive oil to coat with a bit over, followed by an hour and a half in a hot oven.

Gravy is another controversial topic. My mother always used the juices from the meat, without any help from Bisto and that is what I like best, while my brother-in-law likes ‘army sauce’, thick brown Bisto blanket sauce, so sometimes we have two jugs on the table. To make my gravy, I roast onions in the pan with the meat to get a good caramelised flavour and brown colour, as chicken juices are pretty anaemic looking. When the chicken is cooked I take it out of the roasting pan and keep in warm, draw off most of the fat from the pan and then add in a liberal dash of wine, some water reserved from par-boiling the potatoes and then bubble it all up. The flavour is usually fairly concentrated, so taste it and see if you need more water. The only problem is it almost never quite makes enough gravy for my family, who love it soaked into their potatoes, even on their third helping!

After at least three weeks without a roast, there were a series of yums around the table as everyone tucked in happily to their favourite meal. The potatoes were shared out equitably, totaling six each and there were very few leftovers. I remember in my childhood, my mother managed to carve a chicken, so one half was Sunday lunch and the other half eaten cold with salad the next day. I think chickens have shrunk since then, as ours was a quivering ruin of bones with a few shreds of leg meat still attached by the end! And they had room for pudding...

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A Trip into Town in an Orange Silk Scarf

Most of the time I am at home here, take sights that would astound someone fresh in from Europe for granted, like a lorry crammed with people in the open back, barreling along the main road. Sometimes, though, I feel like a tourist here, seeing things with fresh eyes, especially when I go into Cape Town on an almost joll, which doesn’t happen all that often.

I don’t know whether it was my bright orange silk scarf, or the flu I was warding off, but I seemed to float around the most confusing shopping mall in Cape Town (the Cavendish, if you’re wondering) even with a heavy bag over my shoulder. It is the local mall for loads of Cape Town friends, who treat its tortuous layout with casual familiarity, but I was adrift without a compass.

Desperately in need of a pee, with no obvious signs in sight, I at last found the X marks the spot map of the centre. Pondering its intricacies I was rescued by a kindly young security man, who politely enquired if he could help. I immediately received detailed and step by step instructions to the nearest toilets without a hesitation, or a flicker of amusement at my plight. The instructions were spot on and I found the elusive rest rooms round a corner, up a flight of stairs and across a hallway, just as he said.

Upon entering I was welcomed by an effusive and genuine ‘Hellooo’, by a smiling, tall and elegant woman who was mopping the charcoal tiled floor, in case a drip from the basin should cause anyone to slip. She made me feel like a long-lost friend, maybe she thought she knew me? Telling it back now, I fear I was hallucinating – this has never happened to me before, not even in Harrods or Liberty’s!

The main errand to the bank was achieved and some atypical advance Christmas shopping completed before fatigue set in, the flu was fighting back, despite the floaty orange scarf. I put on Mamma Mia to get me home on a wave of good cheer.

At the petrol station heading home was a truly modern African scene. It is undergoing building renovations and was bristling with men in hard hats, doing complicated things on scaffolding. At the pump next to mine two sinewy men in orange hard hats were trying to trim a short metal rod with a hand saw. Their orange reflective vests were flapping in the gusting south-easter, as they stood round a black plastic dustbin, which they had turned into a makeshift workbench. A half brick on top raised the rod enough to clear the dustbin lid and one man held the rod while the other sawed. It wasn’t working and a petrol attendant came over to help by holding the other end, several more men grouping round to watch. They were still sawing when the attendant brought back my card and I drove off, wondering what would happen in Europe if Health and Safety caught you up to something like that … but at least they were wearing hard hats!

The flu did get me, but I took yesterday off and am feeling well enough to go to belly dancing tonight. It must be the orange scarf doing its work after all!

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Bob the Builder Eat Your Heart Out!

Bob the Builder, look to your laurels! This team can fix it and handle the business side too, all in fairy dresses. And they know how to use a spirit level!

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Monday Mornings

When you bake bread every other day there are bound to be some disasters occasionally: usually forgetting about it, either while it is rising or once it is in the oven, as the computer inveigles you away to another time zone. Most of them are salvageable though – bread is very accommodating stuff and you can usually knock it down and re-form loaves that have risen too much, and still eat a rather crusty loaf that had 20 minutes too long in the oven.

This morning I woke gradually, still clinging on to sleep and recalling dreams... then came to full consciousness with a jolt, shrieking silently: “Aaaagh, my bread!”.

Monday morning struck with a vengeance – the batch of bread I’d got going before supper the previous day, with just enough time to rise, knock down, shape, rise and bake before bed-time, had spent the whole night on its first rise – the yeast would be grumpy and exhausted, reduced to alcoholic fermentation to pass the time. The resulting bread would taste revolting and be horribly indigestible.

I’d have to chuck it.

I hate wasting so much good ingredients, purely through my own fault.

It would be shop bought sliced bread from the freezer emergency stash for the kids’ sandwiches and another batch to knead for lunch.

Harumph!

I’m not sure that this is my most memorable baking disaster – the prize for that would have to be the rye loaf that baked into an offensive weapon after an extra hour in the oven – or the batch of crunchies that set my sister-in-law’s oven on fire - but it is certainly one of the most annoying. What’s your worst baking disaster?

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Braai by the Pool

Bright sunshine glints on the water of the swimming pool, which is still slightly murky after its winter rest despite a week’s machinations of chemical cocktails to clear it. Yellow leaves from the karee willow float here and there on the surface, bound to clog the filter, but the tree lives on to dapple us with its shade, fiercely defended by the romantic among us versus the practical ones, who would replace it with a less shedding sort of a tree. Three children shriek with laughter as they create choppy seas with their boogy boards, eventually slopping water over the sides of the pool, until Youngest reprimands them for wasting water. The sprinkler is industriously turning in a desperate attempt to return the grass to some semblance of lawnhood – dry now after a crop of wild daisies clothed it in early spring, it is sparse and stubbly, slightly greener than the surrounding straw-coloured fields but not by much. Spring has finally uttered its last breath - the summer landscape of grey-blue mountains and yellow-brown fields is back.

We are in a celebratory mood – our new summer house by the pool is finished, but for a few trifles. What last year was a tin-roofed shelter, with stick walls that allowed the south-easter to whistle through, now has solid plank walls, lined with plasterboard and painted a sophisticated cool grey –‘like concrete’ was our builder’s disapproving comment, as we insisted that was the colour we wanted! We are having a family braai to christen our new space, lounging on the low walls that enclose the front, enjoying the respite inside from the ever-blowing wind. Wafts of smoke fragrant with braaiing meat drift over. Several conversations eddy backwards and forwards, voices weaving and intertwining in a family that all talks at once. Braai tongs in hand our braai-master admires the growth of the wattle tree, now taller and spreading, after a good winter of endless rain. A discussion on what plants to put in the beds, devastated by the building work, melds with some commentary on the latest springbok rugby match.

Screeches erupt from the braai, as a length of boerewors has fallen in the fire – conflicting advice fires in all directions – put it back on,! it’ll be fine – wash it! – not in the pool, in the sprinkler, I don’t like chlorine on my sausage! Order is eventually restored and the conversation tempo returns to its normal animated hum.

The children emerge from the pool shivering in the wind and dress in the dappled shade of the tree, shouting at Amy, the Jack Russell – a total princess who would like a silken cushion to be carried about for her to lie on, but in the absence of such refinements has at last found a comfortable place to curl up - on the children’s clothes.

Hands cold from the pool embrace my warm bare shoulders, wet hair drips down my T-shirt as Youngest smiles affectionately into my face.

‘Lunch is ready’ announces the braai-master in triumph, bearing aloft a pot of sausage and one of spicy chicken wings, as she comes in out of the heat of sunshine and fire. Calm and silence descends as everyone makes headway into paper platefuls of sausage, wings, salad, foil baked butternut and potatoes.

“A braai is the most satisfying meal there is," announces my braai-maaster sister-in-law at last, as we heave contented sighs of repletion.
“It’s because it’s all about community, we all take part in the preparation and are together as we put it together,’ answers her sister.
“It’s the primitive satisfaction of cooking over a fire” suggests her husband.

The summer house is well christened. We finish off with apple cake and meringues and milk tart, until we are totally stuffed rather than elegantly replete. More plans are made – electricity is the next thing, so we can have a kettle for tea and coffee. Cupboards so we don’t have to carry all the cutlery and crockery down from the house each time. Nets on the ceiling to dissuade the birds from nesting and adding ‘texture' to the floor – once the present brood of starlings has flown the nest, of course. They are cheeping protestingly now, as our presence has kept the parents away too long and they are hungry. It is time to clear away our feast and leave them to theirs.

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Reading South Africa

When I met and married my South African husband, I knew we were going to end up living here. It was part of the deal: he had been living in London for fifteen years and wanted to come home. We made a few visits over here to his family before we tied the knot and I started looking for some South African novelists to read, to help me understand a bit more about this country I would be moving to.

Ask about classic South African novelists and you will inevitably end up with a selection of Nadine Gordimer for gritty, struggle, political angst and then some Dalene Matthee for ‘how it was back then in the early days of rural South Africa’ atmosphere. They are both excellent reads, but I struggled with Nadine Gordimer. Escapist she certainly is not and identifying with her protagonists was a challenge – too much gritty reality and human failings for bedtime reading. Dalene Matthee I enjoyed more, the characters sprang to life for me and gave me a sense of the history of this complex country. But I never found the South African equivalent of the English books that are my best reads: books about people, their stories, well-written but without an external agenda. Not surprisingly really, as the past century of South Africa’s history is cluttered with meaty agendas that affect everyone’s lives whether they are politically engagé or not.

Recently I stumbled upon two South African novels in the library that I really have enjoyed. Not because they avoided difficult issues, they were each set in a period of huge drama and political change when Apartheid was flexing its muscles, but because the story was about the people and their personal growth amid cataclysmic events.


Sweet Smelling Jasmine by Jenny Hobbs tells the story of a pivotal year in the life of a teenage girl, just south of Durban, parallel with her later life as a mother of three grown-up children, whose marriage has dried up, but who is embarking on a blossoming affair with a man from that year of her youth. Throughout the novel his identity is kept in the dark, as her teenage life unfolds towards the cataclysmic event that overshadows the whole story. This is small-town life where the races are not yet kept separate and a feeling of tension weaves throughout, but it is cleverly written from a teenage perspective so that more importance is given to the unattainable perfect dress in the shop window, than to the political machinations of the adults around her, though they filter through to her as viewed by her adult self. I loved this book for its human drama as well as the clear picture it paints of its place and time.


Dance with a Poor Man's Daughter by Pamela Jooste is also set in a time when cataclysmic events were taking place and is narrated by a teenage girl. This time the overhanging threat is the shameful razing of District Six in Cape Town, a government resettlement policy that has left a still open wound in people’s consciousness today, when a whole homogenous community, made-up of Coloureds, Jews, Muslims was evicted and resettled according to its component parts and the apartheid policy. It is recounted by a vivacious teenager, living in a family of strong women, whose men are all no good, according to her grandmother. She tells everything as she sees it, recounting adult conversation verbatim, and paints a vivid picture of the community and people, her family, her gangster cousin and her runaway mother, who returns a political activist to fight for their cause. The story is of resilient women, living their lives as best they can amid the changes that beset them and never losing faith in themselves or life itself.

Thinking about it, the difference between these two and my experience of Gordimer, is that both their protagonists grow through the story and retain hope for the future, despite the events that happen to and around them, whereas my memory of Gordimer’s books is of an atmosphere where despair has taken over and the characters disintegrate around it, perhaps at the end salvaging the barest, bleak bone of hope for a featureless future. This is not to say that you shouldn’t read her books – you should - they are excellent literature. But this is when I have to admit that I haven’t re-read any of her books over the last ten years. They are uncomfortable sofa companions for me and I prefer my realism with a little patina of optimism. A story doesn’t have to be sugar-coated, but, for me, there is enough doom and gloom about without voluntarily pulling more of it from the book-shelf.

Despair very soon sinks you in apathy, which gets you nowhere but sagging deeper into the sofa. To live in South Africa today I need to hang on to my hope, sipping it from small details of individual stories, one person at a time, keeping my optimism firmly rooted in the human will to survive and grow.

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Sunshine in an Orange Skin

Living in a sunshine country we are totally spoilt with the abundance of fruit grown right here in the Cape. We revel in fruit that actually ripens to full flavour, that is sold by the roadside when in season, so that you can buy boxes of peaches that will all ripen at once sending you into an orgy of fruit salads, pavlovas and smoothies, just to use them up before they self-destruct.

At a time when food prices are rocketing, it has been a joy to me for the last two or three months to buy a huge bag of sweet juicy oranges, 24 in the last bag I counted, for only R8.99 in our supermarket (that’s about $1!). If we could live just on oranges we’d be laughing all the way to the bank!

So we’ve been having oranges segmented like grapefruit and eaten with a spoon for breakfast, then, when that palled, we squeezed the juice and drank it. The best of all has been this orange sorbet recipe, which takes all the goodness and flavour of fresh oranges and stores it in the freezer until it intensifies into a dessert that completely satisfies your taste-buds and which is at its very best with some dark chocolate. I made two huge ice-cream containers full earlier in the season. Unfortunately it went down so well with everyone that they have both all but vanished. My sister-in-law was so horrified at the thought of there being none left for Christmas lunch, that I scooped an extra sack of oranges into my shopping trolley yesterday, to make another big container full; this one labeled with a “Not to be opened before 25^th December notice”.

The recipe is very simple, even simpler if you have a machine to squeeze the oranges for you, and doesn’t need anything more doing to it once it’s in the freezer. I made it last year with naartjies (clementines) and served it in their scooped out skins, which was a more fiddly business but looked very pretty.

Orange Sorbet Recipe

20 smallish oranges
juice of half a lemon
100ml/ ½ cup water
icing sugar (if needed to sweeten)

Syrup
250ml/ 1 cup sugar
150 ml/ 2/3 cup water
juice of ¼ lemon

Make the syrup by heating the syrup ingredients over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved and it looks clear. Boil for 2-3 minutes, then leave to cool, while you prepare the rest.

Wash half the oranges well, then grate their zest finely. Squeeze the juice from all of the oranges and the half lemon. Mix in the water and cooled syrup and taste to see if any more sugar is needed. Add water, lemon juice or sugar until you get the right intensity and sweetness, remembering that frozen desserts need a little extra sweetness to bring out the flavour. Freeze until firm.

The sorbet keeps well and is even better a week after making. Hide it at the back of the freezer if you want it to last till Christmas!

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Warm, fuzzy blog awards

I love getting blog awards, it gives me a warm buzz of belonging, so thanks to Jeanne of Cooksister for giving me one of these. Now, according to the rules, I get to share it with seven more blogs I love to read:

Here are the rules:

1) Add the logo of the award to your blog.
2) Add a link to the person who awarded it to you (as shown above).
3) Nominate at least seven other blogs.
4) Add links to those blogs on your blog

So, in no particular order, I nominate:
Mary Alice of From the Frontlines
Charlotte of Charlotte's Web
Hen of Diary of Domestic Hiss
Jenny of Prairie Farmeress
Planet Nomad
Corey of Tongue in Cheek
Meredith of Poppy Fields

And I had to leave out loads more blogs that I love to read to keep it down to seven, so please feel a bit of blog love coming your way, even if I haven't linked to you right this minute!

Now I'm hitting the sofa with a bar of Lindt Intense Orange chocolate and a mug of Rooibos tea - the weekend has begun!

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Brown is the New Black

The post election global exhalation reached our house at breakfast this morning, with another illustration of this generation's different perceptions of colour to those of their hide-bound older generation parents.

It's a normal school day filled with the usual rush to get breakfasted, sandwiched and out of the door by 7.30. This morning it is different though - an air of excitement and celebration riffles across the cereal packets, the TV is on and Dad is leaning forward soaking up Obama’s oratory. The children gravitate over there, forgetful of the need for hair-brushing and shoes. The girls vaguely grasp the idea of someone having won something important, but aren’t quite sure what and why.

They watch attentively as Obama is joined on stage by his vice-president and both their wives.

“Who won?” Middle Daughter asks.

“Barack Obama,” we say.

“But who won?” she repeats, perhaps thinking that this is the name of the game.

“The black guy,” I explain, with only two guys to be seen on the podium.

“ Oh, the brown guy,” she corrects me, happy to get her facts straight and be able to focus on the right guy as the winner.

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Spring Blossoms

Spring is really here, the warmer weather, as always, ringing the final knell for any lingering spring flowers. A week of sunshine without rain and the flower fairies are hard put to it to keep their blossoms alive, as the sandy soil dries out in a flash of a lamb's tail and before we know it the garden is fading and thirsty.

A last celebration of spring, as the girls made a fairy garden, while we were braaiing last Saturday, in the last remnants of daylight after the sun had dipped below the horizon.

Hard at work they ran about the garden collecting blossoms and carefully embroidering them into a tapestry fit for a fairy queen.

A garden of blooms for the fairies to dance under the starlight - seizing the moment to enjoy the ephemeral beauty before sunrise shrivels it to dust.

A fairy circle with a mountain of rose quartz to bring love and warmth to all around.



And the first fruits of our veggie garden - alas no strawberries this year but loads of tender peas. Every pod had its peas counted to see whose age it matched. All those with six went to Youngest - the eight-pea pods to Middle Daughter and the in betweens were fair game for anyone - a chore became a fascinating game of counting and excited chatter. Enough peas for supper and some for the freezer. With mint they were delicious, though Youngest prefers them raw.

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Growing up in South Africa

The intrepid and adventurous four

This picture says it all for me about children growing up in South Africa today.
Ryan, the son of our coloured gardened/farm worker drew it a few days ago and I grabbed it to photograph to share with you. He goes to school with our children, his fees paid by a sponsorship fund we’ve just set up, and he spends most weekday afternoons here playing with them, until his father finishes work. Our children look on him as an extra member of the family by now – he gets invited to all their birthday parties. It is taken for granted, even if the girls are only inviting other girls for the main part. He’s an honorary brother.

In the picture he has drawn our son as the leader, then himself, followed by the two girls, all armed to the teeth off on some perilous adventure. What I like about it is that they are all the same shade of brown: he sees them as the same as himself, until he made a belated attempt to give Youngest light coloured hair – a dawning recognition of a difference, but only as an afterthought.

It reminded me of another illustration of how our children perceive colour these days, using it as a descriptive term rather than a racial pigeonholing, and saying that a friend is 'light brown' or 'dark brown', rather than 'black' and 'coloured', which are the racial identifiers used by the adult world around them. To them it's just another physical characteristic like hair or eye colour and I hope they never have this perception clouded as they grow up.

I’m sure together they will vanquish the mysterious fire that is engulfing the tree and any dragons that lurk off- stage and stride victorious into a new world that they claim for themselves.

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Of Chocolate and Presidents

It’s Sunday - a leisurely day that stretches empty ahead of us, now the rush of German students and their teacher have departed for a three day exploration of the Cape. Our girls have abandoned us to have lunch with their aunt, so it is just three of us sitting down at the table to eat up the leftovers from last night’s braai: Grabouw boerewors and spicy chicken wings, with the wine-enriched juices to pour over cold new potatoes and salad leaves.

Sunday means sweets after lunch and our son left the table swiftly, to assemble his selection from the stash of goodies given to them recently. They each have a packet of Italian Baci, brought from Germany, that I have been eyeing furtively each time I open the fridge, but that I honorably resist, as there are only about four in each packet and I know they’ve counted them. I casually ask our son if he really likes them, as I know a hazelnut lurks in the centre of each one, and he hates nuts. Hoping to have them passed on to me, or at least be given a bite to remove the offending nut, I discover that he has invented a way round it.

“I like the chocolate bit,” he says blithely, oblivious to my designs, “so I suck the whole thing and then spit the nut in the bin.”

Foiled! Not even I would be interested in the nut after that!

At lunch we were amazed to find that our son could discourse knowledgeably about the American presidential candidates, knowing the names of all of the ones from the first round, as well as who is currently ahead in the polls. “Obama has 63%,” he says authoritatively.

Impressed, we enquire how he knows all this. Do we have a budding political genius like Jennifer Lopez’ son in Maid in Manhattan?

He dashes our fond hopes without more ado and reveals that he’s been playing a game online, called Commander in Chief, involving all the presidential candidates, where he has to shoot the bad guys to protect them. The name of each of the candidates is attached to their figure and he is on first name terms with Hilary.

“How do you know which are the bad guys?” I ask.

“They wear masks,” he replies.

Of course… I should have known.

Apparently he has also been paintballing with Hilary and Obama, though one time he played on McCain’s side, until his father pointed out the error of his ways…

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Rubbing Shoulders with Poverty

It was Blog action day on Wednesday. I saw it on Charlotte’s Web, where she posted about AIDS in South Africa. The theme that they asked Bloggers around the world to write about was poverty, to get a world wide dialogue going, whether from a personal or general point of view.

I didn’t post about poverty on that day, though I did write a long comment on Charlotte’s post. The truth is that I love my rose-colored spectacles, looking on the bright side, seeing the sunny view and I like to keep my blog calm and rosy! Living in South Africa though, we are rubbing shoulders with poverty the whole time. It is not tucked away in a separate housing district like in many European countries. It is sitting beside the main road into Cape Town from the airport for all to see. Our employees live in what would be considered abject poverty in Europe, but here they are better off than many because they have a regular salary. Half of the children from our children’s school come from an informal settlement of shacks that we drive past every day on the way to school.

We have to grow a tough skin in our daily life. There is no way that you can solve all the problems of everyone you meet, wave a magic wand and make it all better. You have to concentrate on helping a few people in as constructive a way as you can and get on with your lives. At the moment we are putting a lot of energy into our school, finding sponsors and fundraisers to keep it going into another year, so that as many children from disadvantaged backgrounds as possible can get an education that gives them a future.

The school provides them with a secure and stable educational environment but there is nothing we can do about their home lives. There is a long political history to these informal settlements that I won’t try to explain coherently here, but this one has a large proportion of people from the Eastern Cape/ Transkei, who have come here from a very poor rural area to find work. Up till recently all the houses were shacks, built of planks, plastic and corrugated iron, the roads just packed dirt. Water comes to standpipes at the bottom of each street and there is one toilet between about twenty houses. It looks haphazard in the extreme, but apparently there is a committee who runs everything and allocates space etc. In the last couple of years the government has had a building program going and quite a few families have been resettled in new block-built houses that, though tiny, have four rooms, running water and electricity. This doesn’t mean that the old shacks are torn down though, as there is always someone else ready to move in to a vacated space.

Up till recently this has always seemed a relatively peaceful community, away from the tensions that affect some of the Cape Town townships. We were worried about the recent xenophobia riots spreading out here, but luckily they didn’t. However, as in any human community where people are living in close quarters and on the breadline, there is much back-biting and resentment, especially about who gets the new houses. Two nights ago the official committee decided to do something about the problem of illegal shack extensions being built onto some of the houses. Apparently they went in and just knocked them down. This unsurprisingly set tensions flaring and in retaliation many of the committee members’ shack houses were torn down.

This is all hearsay. I wasn’t there. We hear it from the domestic workers at Camphill, who philosophically shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives; from the children at school, a few of whom lost their houses in the night, and others who were afraid to go home after school, in case their house would be gone. We see the damage when we drive to school, where a second night of fighting and toitoiing has left the debris of bonfires in the middle of the road; where the school sign has been torn down and rest sadly half burnt at the side of the road; the new banner advertising registration month for the school that went up only that morning has disappeared altogether.

The atmosphere at school is unchanged, an oasis of calm, where these children who have had to learn resilience very young, can come and feel safe from the uncertainty that surrounds them.

We are looking for sponsors for many of these children. The school needs financial help to keep places available for them, so I’m putting the link to the school site to help spread the word. If you feel inspired to link to the site too or know someone who might be interested in sponsoring a child’s school fees, please do send the word out into the blogosphere. Every little bit helps give a child a chance to grow into a better future.

We're lucky.We only rub shoulders with poverty. Our children are growing up with an awareness of how lucky they are. Poverty isn't something that happens in far-off lands when you live in South Africa. The child next to them in class goes home to it every day. It is something that affects real people that they know well. I hope it gives them understanding and humanity as they grow up and I hope that I am learning it too.

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Toy Memories

All it takes is a toy, to make the years slip away and take you back in time.

There is a certain plastic fire engine with loads of buttons, that we gave away to Tina, who cleans for us, for her little boy. He is now 2 ½ but was born premature with water on the brain, so has had a hard start to life with much time spent in hospital and he was not expected to live for long. Her love and devotion has kept him going however and he is now getting stronger, though his development is at least a year behind his age. She usually leaves him with a carer while she’s at work but at the moment can’t find anyone, so has been bringing him with her this week.

So the red fire engine has re-entered our lives. The electronic siren, singing voice and exhortations to Grab a Star (I think) that used to drive me crazy when my children were small, are back, playing interminably in the other room, as I sit at my computer.

I am transported back to when my toddler son was given this fire engine for Christmas. We were living in a flat in South London: one of those terraced houses with two doors; a flat upstairs and one downstairs, backing on to an embankment with the station and the main railway line for the Gatwick Express. The landlord lived in the upstairs flat, a very sweet older gay man, and it was him who presented our son with the fire engine, thus inflicting its dulcet tones on us for the next five years!

It was a strange period in our lives. We were in the flat for only nine months, until we bought our own house further out, but it was the first time I’d been home alone with our son, while my husband went in to work every day. Before that we’d lived at the studio: work, home and baby nursery all combined in the one office space, with lots of people coming and going. I had to adjust to a routine with just one small toddler to base my day around, and soon a new pregnancy that made shopping a sick joke, with the local Sainsbury’s within walking distance, but having an unfortunate mix-up of smells at the entrance, so that instead of smelling the bakery as you entered, it seemed that it was the fish counter that welcomed you (though it could have been my oversensitive hormones).

This was the time when we would go for a slow walk down the street to watch the diggers digging up the street or walk to the local parks to pass the afternoon. I tried to avoid driving too often which would mean losing our parking place and having to park miles away. We had our first ever Christmas tree, bought in the street market and small enough to sit on a table, for which we made our own star decorations out of card and silver foil.

Every morning our son would howl desolately as his father left for work, making him feel awful. He’d spend hours helping me with the washing up, getting us both soaked in the process. This was also when I discovered the Waldorf system, with a toddler group at the kindergarten close by. His discovery of television, which we’d avoided till then but which became a survival tool for those too early mornings with Sesame Street, showing every morning at six, saving our sanity when our early waking son had been awake for an hour already. The desperate anxiety of a croup attack in the night. Terrible tantrums for a several week period when he decided that baths were no longer an option, hair washing even less so and teeth were not to be brushed ever.

So long ago but all brought back as if it were yesterday at the touch of a button and an irritating tune.

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Testing Talent

The children have just gone back to school after their two week break, the house is momentarily quiet, with four high school students from Germany asleep upstairs after their long flight here, come to work on building a sports field for our school during their holidays.

I need to get the writing mojo back. It’s foundering beneath all the number of practical things needing doing. It feels like the school is taking over our lives – I’ve got to think about doing the school photos, starting to organize the end of year newsletter, doing packed lunches for the visiting students, cooking a proper evening meal and entertaining the teacher who is staying with us for the three weeks (the students are going on to other school families), communicating with potential sponsors. My husband is overseeing the student’s sports field project, finding supplies, getting the ground leveled, as well as being on the board and making all sorts of difficult financial decisions. And we both need to work for our living as well. Sometimes it all feels too much. How about a nice pre-packaged school where you pay your fees and that’s it. Except that we love the Waldorf system and can see how much it has done for our son at least, who is now far more self-confident than we could have expected that shy little boy to become in his first days there.

I remember his first school concert, when he was in Class 1 and just turned 7. The whole class came on stage hand-in hand to sing a couple of songs. He was in the middle of the row and just as well that they were all holding hands, as his eyes were tight shut. He sang the songs and did all the movements perfectly, keeping his eyes closed throughout, narrowly missing hitting his neighbour with his outstretched arms at several points. He quite unintentionally stole the show!

At the end of last term the oldest class organized a Talent Contest as a project. They wrote to local businesses to organize prizes, put up posters to get the rest of the school to enter. We had no expectation of our children entering, until we heard from one of the teachers that our son had said he was going to do a magic trick for it… It was the first we’d heard of it.

He’s got a book of magic tricks and had been most struck by all the number tricks in it, the kind where you pick a number, double it etc etc and then he can tell you your original number. He planned to go on stage and do some of these tricks. He asked for one of his friends to come for the afternoon so they could practise. The friend duly came, but no practising was done, they were too busy doing other things and when I gently reminded him about it, he said that he might not do it after all. Fine, I thought, he’s chickened out, I don’t blame him.

I mentioned it to his teacher and the next thing I knew she said he was going to have three assistants on stage with him and it was all settled. Dead silence on the subject at home. We hoped that he was doing some practice with his assistants at school.

Finally, as the day arrived, we got more pro-active with our interrogation techniques. We finally extracted the information that he’d worked out exactly what he was doing in his own head, but hadn’t had a run through with his assistants at all. My husband persuaded him to go through it all out loud at home with me standing in as an assistant, him standing at the back of the room to get our son to speak loudly enough. We found a clip board for the assistants to write the numbers on large enough so that the audience could see the figures with the idea of making it slightly more interesting to watch..

Unfortunately his tricks relied on the Maths skills of the assistant to come up the right answer and as an assistant even I managed to add up the figures wrong and spoil the trick once or twice. We came up with a one-liner he could use in this event and got him early to the talent show to have a run through with his designated assistants.

Heart in mouth, we sat down in the audience and the show eventually began, with several lively dance routines, which got the audience going.

He was going to have to come on next and hold the attention of this rumbustious audience. I crossed my fingers.

On he came with his gallant assistants.
Announced his trick.
Told his assistants what to do.
A long pause followed while they huddled all three of them round the clip board, its back to the audience, with much whispering going on.
Eventually they worked out the answer, found the correct playing card, held it up to the audience and our son was able to guess the right number.
Generous applause.

The audience was patient as they launched into a second trick. This time the huddling went on longer, with hushed arguing over the answer while our son stood quietly by and watched them. Eventually he could bear it no longer and had to go and help them with the Maths, which slightly curtailed the trick, as of course he would now know the answer. We meanwhile were holding on tight to our seats to restrain ourselves from rushing up on stage to sort them out. Wisely he abandoned any ideas of doing tricks number 3 and 4 and retired from the stage in reasonably good order.

I, of course, felt like rushing back stage to see if he was alright, but couldn’t be so embarrassing and eventually he rejoined the audience nonchalantly enough and watched the rest of the show. There were several other acts after that that dried up slightly, so he wasn’t alone in that, and at the end after the judging and the main prizes were handed out, there were smaller prizes for all the others, so he and his assistants got something out of it .

All he would volunteer afterwards was that next time he’d get someone else to be his assistant. A bit later at bed time, rather poignantly, he said that he wished his friend Matthew (who moved away last year and was good at Maths too) was still here.

What impressed me however was that this slight, shy ten year old, who three years ago was keeping his eyes tight shut on stage, was able to hold his ground on the same stage, even while the trick was falling apart around him and the audience starting to get a bit restless, that he had the self-confidence to even think about ‘next time’.

I was the one who was in agonies inside, shattered nerves and the rest. He, unless he is a master of disguise on the emotional front, which could be the case, seemed cool, if somewhat irritated that his friends aren’t maths geniuses like him.

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The Milk Tart Calcium Solution

Crustless Milk Tart - now an official calcium food source

Baking often seems to inspire a blog post. Perhaps that’s why I’ve hardly posted recently – I just haven’t been baking apart from the daily bread, which has become so automatic that it no longer gets the blog juices flowing. Today, after I’d spent an hour in the spring sunshine (yes we have sun! at last!) pulling a pretty flowering weed out of the ‘lawn’, which looked far worse once divested of its spreading bushiness, I was finally inspired to get another batch of rusks baked.

The house was quiet, with the kids over at their aunt’s house, my husband and dogs doing something chemical to the pool to pull it out of its winter stupor. Kneading and rolling dough into balls induced a meditative state and led me on to using up some out of date milk on making a crustless milk tart.

Milk tart is one of the most traditional South African desserts. You’ll find it at every braai, bake sale, tea party, anywhere that friends bring along a dessert. This version is by far the easiest recipe there is for it and can be whizzed up in the food processor in no time at all. It does without the pastry base of the classic milk tart and is maybe a tad less creamy in texture, but it is incredibly moreish and all my kids love it. Plus it uses up milk that is on the turn and with the price of milk these days I hate to chuck it out, so making this makes me feel good.

Even better it solves the problem of how to get enough calcium into our son to meet anything like the daily recommended dose. He’s given up cereal at breakfast, opting for toast and if we’re lucky some orange juice. He doesn’t like drinking milk, has a few slivers of cheese in his school sandwich for lunch. He’ll sometimes finish supper with a bowl of yoghurt. I know there are plenty of calcium sources besides dairy: nuts and seeds, for instance, which he won’t eat at all; dark green vegetables, yeah right, broccoli a couple of times a week is his limit there; sardines, no way; eggs yuk…

So as I broke the eggs into the food processor into the milk and butter, my eyes weren’t seeing the ingredients – they were looking at a pulsing headline in neon – CALCIUM FOOD SOURCE!!

Here is something that he’ll happily eat and get some nutrients in to him. I can bake and feel like I’m doing my job as a mother. Maybe our slight, slim boy has a chance of growing up big and strong after all … though if I produced it every day, I’m sure he’d go off it soon enough.

I posted this recipe about a year ago, but I’ll repeat it here just in case you too need a way to get some dairy into your family or maybe even just because it’s easy to bake and delicious!

Crustless Milk Tart Recipe

¾ cup / 185ml self-raising flour
2 cups / 500ml milk
2 eggs
¾ cup / 185 ml sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 oz / 25g melted butter
pinch salt
½ tsp cinnamon

Put all the ingredients together into a bowl or food processor and beat to a smooth batter. Pour into a buttered pie dish (approximately 23cm/9" in diameter, but it doesn't matter if it's not exact,the finished tart will just be either a bit deeper or shallower). Sprinkle the cinnamon over the top. Bake for 45 minutes at 175C / 350F. Serve warm or cold. It sinks and becomes denser as it cools. If you eat it hot you'll need a spoon to scoop up the soft custardy tart but cold you can pick up the slices in your hand, if it hasn't vanished long before then.

Having said all that I just Googled calcium food sources and found a chart that tells me that baked beans are a good source of calcium. Phew – he loves baked beans, now I can relax!

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Current Addictions Meme

I haven’t done a meme for ages but Jeanne of Cooksister just tagged me for the Current Addictions meme, so how could I resist?

The rules:
* Post at least five current addictions (with some details, please).
* Mention the person who started this meme (Being Brazen) and also the person who just tagged you
* Type your post with the heading "Current addictions".
* Tag at least two people and pass on the above rules.

1. Lindt Intense Orange chocolate – dark chocolate is my secret indulgence. I hide it in the larder and in moments of stress, or just when I feel like it, I sneak in and a grab a few squares. Unfortunately this Intense Orange has also grabbed my husband’s taste buds, so now I have to get it out openly in the evenings and share it with him.

2. Mamma Mia – Jeanne listed this and I am totally in agreement with her – we’ve seen it twice now, once on our movie date and then we just had to go back with the children and friends – it gives you a total wild and wacky teenage high just by going and singing along! As long as you don’t have a disapproving neighbour glaring at you that is.

3. NCIS – we used just to catch the odd episode every now and again, then it became a regular weekly date.. then Kate was shot. Devastated, as it was the end of the series, we had a year’s break and then we started watching the DVD set of series 3. Series 4 was my husband’s birthday present and then series 5 was released in time to be mine! We love the characters, who would think crime investigation could be so funny and so emotionally involving – love Abby the goth forensic girl and Gibbs is gorgeous (except when he grew a moustache at the beginning of series 4!).

4. Messages – I compulsively check my e-mail far more often than necessary. Text messages on my phone, comments on my blog, e-mails, Facebook messages – it is probably some deep psychological fixation – I get messages therefore I exist. They have to be written messages though – I’m useless on the phone!

5. Reading blogs - even when I’m frantically busy I still turn to Bloglines for distraction at regular intervals. I read everybody’s blogs even when I’m not blogging myself and turn into a non-commenting lurker. Just tuning out of my every day and getting fresh perspective by reading all your views, stories, rants, raves and musings is good therapy, even if it is just a short term escapist measure and I then have to return to the translation or article that I was plodding through.

6. Marmalade - I love marmalade and have to have a supply available at all times. Nobody else in the house likes it, so when I make a batch it is pure self-indulgence and self-protection. You simply cannot buy proper marmalade in the shops here - unless it is home-made by someone else. It has to have chunky bits of peel in - none of this Golden Shred nonsense! My current combination is Orange, lemon, grapefruit and lime. Perfect on bread or toast and essential to round off lunch with, sometimes if I'm feeling degenerate, combined with crunchy peanut butter!

As if you haven’t already got enough to do I’m tagging Mary Alice and Caffienated Cowgirl!

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