I know a Sugarman.

Photograph courtesy of a very tall man.

A performance by Rodriguez last week thoroughly warmed the cockles of my heart. By song number two, tears were rolling down my cheeks. Around us people young and old sang along. A man behind me yelled: you can do anything - we love you man!

Exactly.

Because, you see, it wasn't just an old man
singing his songs.

It was my eight-year-old self playing with the family hound, a grumpy daschund, outside my brother's bedroom window, listening to Cold Fact.

It was my eighteen-year-old self, leaving home, taping that vinyl record to take with me to university. On the other side of Moondance.

It was my nineteen-year-old self posing my boyfriend cross-legged in a hat and a purple vest, for Photography 101.
(He told me I looked fat
in my favourite cheesecloth dress)

It was countless parties and barbeques and trips
in a car.

It was hours of sulking on my bed.

It was wondering, wondering... is there someone who will understand me, is he listening too?

In this job I do, I have built up a network of people and many have become loved ones. I visited a couple yesterday, both in their late seventies. They own a small antique shop and often help me to find the things that I need. Now and then I am invited to their beautiful home - a large stone house next to the sea, with very high ceilings. It is filled with two lifetimes of collecting.

They have recently lost a good friend - a young artist. His self-portrait is on display in the living room and music spills through the house. Was it a huntsman or a player that made you pay the cost...

Rodriguez again. She has her own memories - we were driving to the coast and playing this song, we were laughing so much. And then she winks at me and says: oh that man - he has such a sexy voice - ahhhhh!

The noise in my head.

The whirring of a fan swallows the things that normally wake me in the night. The demented cuckoo clock next door, drunken stumblings in the road, gates slamming shut, the creaking and cracking of old roof timber... but also the good sounds - the gentle whinnying of the horses on the farm, the krr krr of the guinea fowl in their midnight roosts.

I've spent the past two days in a blizzard of paper, a snow squall of pictures, preparing for a presentation. Things were a lot rougher in 1840 than you would imagine.
There were cautions attached to this job and I tread carefully. Unable to sleep last night for worry, I tried my other sure thing. There's a house far away from here - in Shoreditch, London. Victorian terrace, mosaic tiles, black front door. I flatten my troubles one by one and post them through a brass letter slot in that glossy black door. (Some of them take refolding, reposting, more than once.)
 

Last night, without thinking, I turned the doorknob.

......

The troubles were words and they were all there, rendered larger than life in a font called Carnivalee Freakshow, designed by a guy called... Livin Hell.

With spiteful little highlights and towering spiky shadows.

Why is everything so much worse in the deep dark night?

  The night passed, the presentation was a breeze, the feared person not an ogre after all.

Perhaps the new parking machines at Canal Walk know of what they speak.

My Valentine.

My Valentine is a man

who stops traffic on a winding mountain pass

to guide a snake to safety.

Our Lady Of The Lake.

On a location recce yesterday at the Castle, I looked forward to visiting my favourite place - the Dolphin Pool. Imagine my surprise to find not the resident ducks, but a lady swimming there.

A nymph in a turquoise bathing suit and
black ballet pumps.

When you work for the Castle, you are granted birthday wishes. For her fiftieth birthday this lady requested to swim in the pool and remove all of the rubbish that the South Easter had deposited on the bottom of the pool over the past few weeks.

Cardboard boxes, crisp packets, a milk carton or two...

The other apples of my eye, the giant white horses, were nowhere to be seen.

Show Business.

People often think that this is a glamorous industry. There's very little of that, in the art department. But we get around, we see extraordinary things, we meet a plethora of people. The last few weeks have been a right old merry-go-round.

A director who greets one in the mornings, by name. A production designer turned friend, with endless amounts of compassion and understanding. (I wiped away a tear to see him fly away)

A forty meter long Chinese dragon with yellow panted operators. Acrobats. A man soaring through the air in a harness. A prop master's tales of his miniature horse named Geoffrey - we rooted for him through a case of lockjaw. A Japanese director of photography who bent spoons at the breakfast table, claiming that it depleted him so, he was sad over his supper.
A beautiful young contortionist.

World weariness with spangles.

(Photograph courtesy of the Gedi)

Cape Town is dry and dusty. There have been fires in the veldt and at night a dark pumpkin moon hangs over the city. On Monday I travel back in time to the 1840's. Old Texas, the world of the Comanche, horses, tipis and the wild, wild West.

Then it will be Winter and whatever follows that, still a mystery.

More or less.

I blinked.

The holiday was over.

So much for a January spent painting and sewing.

Inveigled.

Silly season: not many moments for oneself, or to share with another. This moment twinkles: last Sunday over breakfast, watching the rock pigeons gleaning the lawn. One of them keeled over and stretched out a wing, as far as it could go. He lay there, lazily sunning the tender pink inside, the tiny white feathers.

Vlerke bak. I miss that.

And Dancer and Prancer and Vixen and Comet.

In the library of the long-legged man (well-ordered, comprehensive, quite wonderful), I came across this photograph by Elliot Erwitt:

The Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta, San Gimignano,
Tuscany, 1965.

I spent a distant birthday in this place, just off to your left. A theatre troupe would practice on the steps in the afternoons and I'd sit and watch them while rekindling my love for ice cream.

 

I think of places in Italy and associate them with ice cream flavours. Bologna is blackberry, Assisi: candied orange peel and fig. San Gimignano is pistachio, served by a friendly white-haired man with no English, but we understood each other just fine.

 

Before my trip, Aida invited me for breakfast and gave me a copy of Elizabeth David's Of Pageants & Picnics, to read on the plane. I thought of her as I sat on that shell-shaped piazza in Sienna, which is lemon and lime.

After she died, Braam gave me her ice cream machine. Italian: of course!

No instruction booklet.

But research reveals that the machine's paddle is called a dasher. I'm liking that, a lot.

 

Experiment 1: mango/chili/mint

Thrilling. Good.

Experiment 2: avocado/banana/honey

The gelato of my dreams.

There is a freezer in my future.

Binding Spells.

 Paul Theroux writes about the soundtrack of Africa - it is not the trumpeting of elephants nor the roar of lions... it is the coo-cooing of the turtle dove. This soundtrack has followed me my whole life long, wherever I have lived. Lucky.

We laugh at the turtle doves flirting on the ridge of the roof. We don't wear shoes and sultry air sashays over bare skin.
There are no mirrors here - only the eyes of another.
 

We are building a secret vocabulary.

While I was away, the lilies died and the jacaranda burst into green.
 

Tonight we'll build a fire under the cooking moon.
I will make ice cream with mangoes and mint.

Eva's broken hearted chicken.

As I cooked, I realized with a pang that I was making something very similar to one of my grandmother's signature dishes. She would send me to the garden to pick the parsley and to pull a bunch of shallots. And I would watch...

You skin the chicken pieces and chop some of the fatty bits finely, along with a couple of rashers of bacon, also finely chopped. Fry in a skillet until nicely browned - the fat rendered. Remove with a slotted spoon. Dredge the chicken pieces in seasoned flour, brown in the same skillet. Return the bacon and skins, shallots, some slivers of garlic, plenty of chopped parsley, a cup of chicken stock and half a cup of dry sherry. Bake at 180C/350F for about forty minutes, basting a couple of times.

 My grandmother never served this dish hot - as it cools, the gravy turns into a delicious jelly, wonderful with a few slices of chicken, on a fresh bread roll.

We ate it warm, with basmati and a salad of chopped heritage tomatoes, charred red pepper and parsley. I made a dressing of balsamic - the one thickened with figs, Mission olive oil from the Karoo and Turkish chili flakes. The vinegar settled into a fat question mark and I could almost feel her there next to me.

I learnt so much in my grandmother's kitchen. I wish I could cook her a meal. I wish I could take her shopping and introduce her to this new wealth of ingredients. She is the one who came to our "Grease" party dressed as a Greek peasant. The one whose ring I now own. A sweet-smelling rose called Aurora. Crumbs for the birds on the lawn. Freshly baked brown bread and apricot jam.

If I had to condense my grandmother into one word, it would be kindness.

Happy Birthday Ouma.

Dog days.

Overtaken by great fatigue, I nap at odd times of the day and sleep for hours, hours every night. The fan whirrs and brings forth dreams of flying contraptions, lemonade stands by the seaside, trickery and deceit.

Finally, tomorrow, this job is over as well. Storms large and small dismissed to a hazy past. The broken axles, the car stuck on the tree stump, the Teutonic alarm clocks... 

Man down on one of the final shoot days: we lost our strapping truck driver to a tummy ache. He disdained the on-set medic and insisted on traditional herbs. Perhaps an offering to Mami Wata, as one does in Cameroon. You try explaining that to a Cranky German Director.

Said CGD left South Africa in a huff, never to return. I was happy to see the back of him and his horses, his temper tantrums and stories of sexual prowess between takes having worn thin particularly fast.

So here's to the return of normality, to cooking, to spending time with the ones I love.

To peace.