Your knee bone connected to your thigh bone.

My fear of needles stems from early childhood. One of the doctors at my father's small town practice used to chase the children with syringes. As a joke. I took it so seriously that I refused to go in and would sit in the car, waiting for my mother. She'd leave Springbok Radio playing, and so began a life-long love affair with music.

I convinced myself that I could never bear to have acupuncture - that house in Plumstead filled with human pincushions, the doctor who spoke no English. But perhaps I was just waiting for the right person. This calm, compassionate man, who can tell, from taking my right pulse and then my left, from the set of my shoulders, that my stress levels are down. Then he says: "But your heart has nervous energy - what's up?"

I lie there in the half light, with ten fine needles in my body while he is at his desk, working on his notes. Behind closed eyelids I see bursts of colour and try to imagine the messages flitting furiously from muscle to brain and back again. And I wonder what it must feel like to live without fear.

There has been a spate of burglaries at the apartments where I live. Someone bypassing a security code, the violent tearing open of gates and doors. Every little sound makes me jump.

The letting agents are astounding in their apathy. (Steer & Company - you suck!)

This is what people say to me, over and over again: TRUST NO-ONE.

I hate that.

It's a major kick under the butt and time for change. While I decide what to do, I Spring Clean.

And take a few days off, away from the big, bad city.

To the magical place where the doors have no keys. We find fragments of other lives. A rusted fork, ancient little bottles. The houses are mostly empty, waiting.

If, instead of words, I could have a photograph as epitaph - this would be it:

In the hour preceding, we took the yellow kayak and paddled out onto the lagoon. Surrounded by flamingos and their chatty honking: they flew up and circled around us, the sound of their wings like the rustling of many taffeta skirts.

Autumn in the city.

Makes me wish, just a little, that I was somewhere else.

Lazy Sunday.

I left the hotel this morning feeling as if I had won the lottery. Could it have been the breakfast of stewed sour cherries, with yoghurt and warm roasted pistachios? Took the tram over the bridge and went in search of the Mosaic Museum. 

Alas, it is closed for renovation. Did some relaxed shopping at Arasta Bazaar. Many glasses of tea later I left with a huge cloth bag full of treasures. Easy friends with Şenol at the Hamam shop. He sells beautiful hand loomed towels from Antakya in the South. For the first time I felt really understood by someone from here. He said to me: "Walk down the hill past Aya Sofya and turn right beneath the big stone arches. It's a park leading to the water. A good place for meditation."

Avenues of ancient trees guarded by an army of marble lions. Silence.

Happiness.

I was very relieved to learn from Oprah that the first step to happiness is the place where you live. I've been feeling a little over-zealous about my new home. Toning down when I speak of it and so on, so as not to appear maniacal.

But the truth is that it has been life changing. I smile every time I walk through the door. Every time I go up the stairs to the loft. Every time I hear a cock crow on the farm.

Every time I look out of a window, I see the horizon. I spend many happy hours cloud-watching.

Last night I heard a girl in an apartment across the street singing along to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. At the top of her lungs. "Home". The reflections of clouds had me enraptured.

The end of hibernation has come. Hello World.

On moving up. And on.

My grandmother's house had an attic. During the holidays we'd all sleep there - two rows of siblings and cousins. Those were some of the happiest times of my life. Maybe it's that association that has made me want my own loft room, for as long as I can remember. They say be careful what you wish for. They say manifest it. Well, it's taken me a while.

A star popped out! As I lay on the floor, drinking a beer, thighs and calves aching from running up and down the stairs, I watched the sky darken and a star popped out. I felt like the king of the world.

It's a good feeling moving because I want to, not because I have to. My first night here and I slept like a little baby. Watching the light change as the day moves on.

Avoiding the herd.

Not to be confused with Anthophobia (a fear of flowers), Anthrophobia is an extreme, pathological form of shyness and timidness. Being a form of social phobia, it may be manifested in fears of blushing, meeting the gaze of others, awkwardness and uneasiness when appearing in society, etc.

I have spells of... let's call it social anxiety. The mere thought of facing a crowd of strange people makes me withdraw into my undemanding little shell. Last week was one of those times and now I suffer a particular kind of ingrained guilt because I disappoint others, as well as myself.

These were the big guns:
 

1. The launch of my dear friend Diane Awerbuck's new collection of short stories, Cabin Fever.

Here in my shell my toes curl and my skin blushes with delight as I read Astronomy Domine.

(The title story strikes tender chords and I lie sleepless, wide-eyed in the dark.)

2. The opening of Gary van Wyk's exhibition of photographs, Private Public.

I went to see it yesterday and was happy to do so without any jostling. I see Gary out and about and I've observed how comfortable people are to be photographed by him. He has this incredible gift - in an unassuming and gentle way - of making people totally at ease. The exhibition left me feeling tranquil and content.

Past (Mirac, Waterval, Gifberg) The Photographer's Gallery

Anthrophobia, in some situations, can result in the person disconnecting themselves from human interaction resulting in the use of electronic contact 

over direct contact.

 Check...

Secrets from the reservoir.

As I ran around the reservoir this morning, I happened past two ladies walking and talking. They were perhaps fifteen or twenty years older than me. This is what I heard as I approached and then passed them by: "As with most things in life... take for instance relationships, the secret is...."

And the rest was tantalizingly lost to the breeze.
Hm.

So, on the next lap, I stopped and said hello.

Turns out that their conversation had been about how people sometimes let themselves go and become bigger than they'd like to be. The taller lady said to me: "It's about being aware. Keeping an eye out. When things feel wrong, even slightly so, take action immediately. And this is the same for relationships. If something feels wrong, do something about it. And if it stays wrong, get out, because otherwise you are wasting precious time and it only gets harder and harder to leave."

As I ran off, she called out: good luck!

You can't sway someone from their journey if it's what they have their heart set upon. But it all goes back to one of my favourite quotations from the man of the generous heart: "Dis okay om foute te maak, maar as jy nie leer van jou foute nie, is jy 'n doos." (It's okay to make mistakes, but if you don't learn from them, you're a c*nt)

I'm not saying I won't make mistakes again. But hopefully next time when someone I'm in love with looks me in the eye and says: "You know I'm a louse, baby.", I'll try to listen past the stars in my eyes and the humming of that tuning fork in my body and take more care. And maybe eat less chocolate.

These lazy days.

I saw creamy pale flamingoes from the M5 yesterday. 

A stuffed Santa Claus in a striped deckchair in Retreat, bleached by the sun.
I felt an unborn baby girl's foot pushing against the inside of her mother's belly.

The house smells like cardomom and almonds.

We sip Pimms by the pool.

The mounted police clip clop past and steam rises from the hot tar road.

 This morning someone blows me a kiss at the reservoir and I have a good feeling.

The one where you run and you run and you don't get tired.

The Service Dining Rooms.

My morning routine has taken a new turn since I bought a juice extractor last week (it is, by the by, the coolest thing since The Hype Machine). I run around the reservoir and then I stop off at Fruit&Veg City in Roeland Street for fresh fruit. Across from their parking lot is a nice old red brick building. I've always looked at the queues of people forming there from mid-morning onwards and wondered about what exactly goes on there. Yesterday I waited for the rush to subside and went back with my notebook...

This is the skinny: 

In 1935, a well-heeled young lady by the name of Dorothy Syfret was approached by a beggar who asked her for a tickey to buy a drink. She replied that she would rather give him a tickey for a meal. Not being one to dilly dally, Miss Syfret enlisted the help of her father, one of the city's leading financiers, and founded The Service Dining Rooms, their function being to provide “a substantial and nourishing midday meal to the poor, for one tickey”.  75 years later, they are still in the same building, but from their starting point of 200 meals a day, they now provide 1200! Not only are sitdown meals served here, meals are also collected and distributed throughout the Cape Flats, informal settlements, old age homes, crèches...

Alternating on the daily menu: bread, soup, meat, fish and spicy soya served with rice or samp, fruit in season, cake and tea. Lunch is served five days a week, Mondays to Fridays from 11h30 till 13h00.

Sponsors include I&J (fish), Tongaat Hulett (50kg of sugar/month) and The Asian Kitchen (meat). Any donations are most welcome.

A hot meal for 5c. 

It's about dignity. Being able to pay for your meal, not begging for it.

The Service Dining Rooms.

82 Canterbury Street. 021 465 2390

Mister Nimbus and flying in sunlight.

The word about town is that Mister Nimbus is coming home to visit. I look forward to seeing them and a new baby cloud. I wrote this when he left, almost three years ago.

Today my friend flies across the ocean to be with his bonny in Oslo. Although we don't spend inordinate amounts of time together, he has a large presence in my thoughts and he will be missed. I have built towering fortifications around myself over the years. I like to think of them as impenetrable, but now and then someone comes along and walks through an unmanned gate, surprising and delighting me. Once again, I have spent a wakeful night. Often thoughts of flying eventually lull me to sleep. When we say good bye, my friend and I, we promise to see each other in dreams. I think of him on the plane and remember the last time that I flew. It was pure escapism. I bought my ticket in the late spring. I remember coming home afterwards, taking a bath and then sitting on my balcony in the weak sun, with bare arms and wet hair. Everything was hurting and all I wanted was to get away to some place with no memories, a city I could walk around in and not see any familiar faces.
To fly across Africa in the daytime is a wondrous thing. I like following the line on the dinky little digital map, but actually have no idea where we really are. There are settlements down there, with huts and cooking fires and animals and people. Suddenly vast slate mountains appear and then hours upon hours of sand. Sahara. The name alone inflames my old-fashioned heart. The dunes form strange patterns from above. Spidery sea things, varicose vein networks. By the time we get to Europe at four pm, it's velvety dark and Paris is incandescent. It gives me a thrill of perfect pleasure. A wing-tip comes close to brushing the Eiffel Tower, it leaves behind a white-hot retinal ghost.
London is a beast of a different stripe, the luminous rush-hour python that is the M25 coiling and hissing around the cosmic sprawl. 

Excitement like soda water in my blood.

Reservoir days. And dogs.

 
I've been waiting for a quiet day to take pictures at the reservoir. Today is that perfect Cape Town day, with no ripples on the water. Even the smog looks picturesque. At this time of year there is always a pair of goose parents and their brood. Father Goose sits up high making a ruckus when you run past. 

I go at different times of the day and it's never crowded. I see girls with i-Pods, guys with long loping strides and last week I did a few laps with a charming bunch of Spaniards. There's a very old man who shuffles around a few times. He wears a blue track suit and knitted hat, very flash nikes and he always says "good morning, lovely day!", then he stands under the palms and does his calisthenics.
 

 The East-African guards told me today that taking pictures is "not official", so I had to shoot from the hip. Luckily I have lots of experience from all my years of taking photos of props in shops that don't allow it.

On my way back home, I pass a house that belongs to two of my favourite dogs. They are always guarding the stoep and when the vacuum cleaner is being used indoors, dog on the left does a perfect 'howling at the moon' stance and yodels. I kid you not. Today the gate was open and they came out to greet me with much shyness and tail-wagging.
 

run run run

I started running again last week. Why I left it so long I couldn't say. I found this in one of my old journals: At the reservoir there was mist hanging over the water and the mountains were purple and crisply outlined. The waterfalls flashed silvery white against the darkness. I saw the ground coming up to meet my feet and the sky reflected in the puddles and all those insurmountable problems seemed smaller. Running heightens my senses. My skin buzzes and tingles. I feel strong and I feel light. I am replete. After my morning run, everything tastes and smells better. The scent of a banana makes me reel, fresh fruit juice feels velvety and luxurious on my tongue - full-bodied in the true sense of the word. 

All of these things are still true.