Unsleeper.

I have always felt very lucky to have my birthday in the spring. Born in a different hemisphere - an autumn baby, I would be someone else.

Imagine spring in one of the most beautiful places in the world, the West Coast of South Africa. The dunes and the meadows swell and ripple in purple, orange and yellow.

The rustling in the bush behind you is, invariably, a tortoise.

Although we were far away from the city, a birthday cake appeared, as if by magic. Chocolate and beet, all the way from a town called Darling.

And a leaning tower of gifts from my darling. Cold shivers as I opened the pages of Vivian Maier's Out of the Shadows.  Books, wonderful books. Ancient plant lore. Antique bottles...

And yet, at night, I lie awake.

I toss, I turn, I fidget and I fret.

I am a bad bedfellow.

Sleep would turn me into a well behaved stranger.

I heard a lone owl hoot. And finally, when a cool lagoon breeze slipped through the window, bringing with it the perfume of the wet veldt, I drifted away for a scant hour.

At Verlorenvlei, I lay inhaling deep breaths of the balmy thatched roof. Outside, the sweet chirruping of koots. Far away, the mournful toot of a long train carrying iron ore from Sischen to Saldanha. The melodious trilling of a fiery-necked nightjar, awake like me, but singing about it.

Splashes in the dark.

In the pale morning light, I cast a sleepy eye at the pelicans bobbing past. Bright flashes of red - bishops dancing through the reeds.

And I thanked the universe, for coffee in particular.

Food for jackals.

Harveya Squamosa. Jakkalskos, katnaels, snail flower, inkblom and a host of other charming nicknames. We saw these furry blooms everywhere on the West Coast, even the shy yellow variety. One day in Churchaven, poking about on my own and without my renegade camera, I also came across the other one for the first time - Hydnora Afrikana.

The one that our own Julia Child, C. Louis Leipoldt talks about in his wonderful book about food and life in the old Cape: Polfyntjies vir die Proe. These photographs via plantzafrica.

They are most unusual to look at - like fleshy geodes. Foul smelling parasites they are, and insect-eaters. Not on the endangered list, yet I wouldn't have the heart to dig around for the underground fruit, for fear of hurting something so bizarrely beautiful. With some sadness, I left them for the monkeys, the porcupines and the jackal.

There are so many things I have never eaten, it fills me with a particular melancholy.

Lingonberries.

Cloud berries.

A shiso leaf.

***

Leipoldt receives a request from his food connoisseur friend from the Congo: to surprise him with something completely indigenous and original. Leipoldt thinks long and hard and decides upon a Jakkalskos Soufflé.

His friend tries to guess...

"With medlars I would never add cinnamon."

Leipoldt merely teases him a little.

"But with guavas I always add some Maraschino - in this case it would have been better!", the friend tries again.

Leipoldt goes on to say that it is impossible to describe the taste - as impossible as trying to describe the flavour of a pineapple. He recommends a small glass of Muscadel wine as accompaniment.

Back in those days you could buy Jakkalskos fruit at the big fish and vegetable market on Greenmarket Square in Cape Town, now sadly an African curio market. Only the cobbles remain.

Christian Louis Leipoldt

1880-1947

Poet, Doctor, Journalist, Cook, Lekkerbek, Traveller,

Buddhist, Mensch.

The way we live.

via http://philip.greenspun.com

Somewhere in my twenties, I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp Museum, near Munich. It was only then that the true horror of this period in history became painfully clear to me.

Although what happened there was hideous - and I remember feeling nauseated, what finally made me break down and weep was the full wall of photographs of the survivors, on the day that they were finally set free. The emaciation, the look in their eyes.

It has happened in the past that I have worked on historical dramas where we have had to do research on the war and dress Nazi offices, or U-Boats. You are surrounded by the colours, the flags, the swastika, the SS logos. It is not something I can get used to and it feels... forbidden, uncomfortable.

Yesterday we went to see a collector about using some of his memorabilia as props and dressing on our current project. In the corridor, a tall woman with a fine paintbrush was doing a trompe l'oeil mural of exposed brickwork and distressed plaster.
The collector received us in his outer office, where there is a considerable amount of Boer War memorabilia - paintings, documents, uniforms and weapons. I found this interesting.

We then started talking about the items we needed to dress a Nazi Colonel's office. I noticed that the collector was wearing a silver SS death head ring on his slim, tanned middle finger.

Tall, suave, a smooth talker. Son of a Dutch Reformed minister. He led us into his inner sanctum, where a large, spot-lit oil portrait of Adolph Hitler presides over his desk. A bronze bust of that man atop a filing cabinet. The deco armchairs, he assures us, are from the Führer's apartment in Vienna. He has sixteen different copies of Mein Kampf. The SS typewriter's s-key reads SS.

"No photographs please", he says with a smile. He chain smokes, holding his cigarette in the underhanded way of a soldier at war.

There are cases filled with medals and weapons. The walls are adorned with portraits and flags. Also, stacked against the wall: portraits of nude, sculpted women.

He lets his hand linger on my shoulder blade when he motions for me to pass.

I think I will make do with what I can rent from the prop houses.

A German evening bag from the 1930's. I found it in Simonstown, at an antique shop. Beautiful at first glance, but hidden amongst the roses...

When my left eye jumps...

In Buddy Guy's song from 1962, When My Left Eye Jumps, he sings about a condition to do with love and voodoo and his woman's black cat bone... an altogether more interesting situation than the one I'm dealing with.

When my left eye jumps, I know that I'm stressed, overworked and spending too much time in front of a computer screen. We came back from a week on the wild West Coast and I jumped straight into the 1930's, a story about a German woman pilot. Issues with budget and crew, too little time and too little money.

The good thing about exhaustion, however, is that it eventually overrides my insomnia, and I get some good sleep, interwoven with whopping dreams.

(Rain Dog)

The new puppies at work definitely brought this one on:

A thin man in a pale linen suit approached me as I was walking along. He doffed his hat and said to me:

"I'm a spin genie. I can grant you two wishes, but I get to choose them. Interested?"

"Sure..."

"The first one is this: when you touch someone just below their chin, they fall into a deep sleep. Very handy for boring people who won't stop talking OR for when you are feeling threatened.

The second is this: you now speak DOG."

We walked on and I had a few conversations with dogs. Very enlightening - dogs are so clever!

But then I noticed that I was also able to converse in excellent German.

"What's up with that?", I asked the spin genie.

"Oh - I forgot to mention, it's a language package deal - DOG comes with German and ahhhhhh," here he consulted his iPhone for a second, "Urdu."

Brilliant! I couldn't believe my luck.

Pity I didn't get to talk to the puppies. I have many questions for them.

(Harold's mid-morning slump.)

(Rain Dog's mid-morning slump. They do everything together.)

And this morning at the market, I wondered what this poodle in dalmatian livery was trying to tell me.

Yellow is the colour.

I write this with fingers stained yellow from cutting fresh turmeric root for a curry. I think of Aida, who found some long ago and gave me a piece to plant. Her number is still on my phone and sometimes I wish I could just talk to her for a while.

It's nice to have her kitchen scale, her ice cream maker, the black taffeta skirt I remember her wearing with a saffron coloured shirt and chunky bangles. But better still are the things she said, her understated way of putting life together. That very important thing she taught me about big decisions: to take a step back, for there is no rush. You'll know, she said.

Keepsake #7.

During my recent move, I came across my grandmother's

autograph album, circa 1922.

Still wrapped in a yellowing, brittle piece of tissue paper.

Considered the "arty" one in the family, I have ended up with these fantastic bits of history.

The foxed pages are filled with sweet, old-fashioned messages and drawings and paintings by her friends...

Something about the drawing below caught our fancy - my sister and I copied it again and again.

This one we found hi-la-rious!

(behind the flap: now turn back again)

And, of course, the fine India Ink drawings of my grandfather. I still have his old dip pens and nibs, though I missed meeting him. It is one of my life's biggest regrets.

A million little things bind us together.

A life in boxes.

I have just completed an interesting little exercise... I jotted down all of the places I have lived and how many times I have moved house.

Twenty-one times.

Luckily, a large part of my work consists of moving stuff around, so I have learnt to do it fast. But it was rather challenging on Friday. Icy cold, intermittent rain, snow on Table Mountain.

Five times of the twenty-one was when I was still a child, living with my parents. Contrary to my mother's best intentions, I turned out to be a magpie. Moving my chattels is an epic production. My beloved swing gang were there to help me - Sam arrived with his trusty old truck and Julius and Roger laughed every time I warned them of a particularly heavy trunk or box. Being the ex wrestling champion of Cameroon, Roger lifts a washing machine with two fingers.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi

We finished the job in five hours. My worldly goods are now in storage and I have a few months to find a new place to live. This is what happens when your rent unexpectedly - shockingly, is to go up by fifty percent. This is what happens when you rent from friends, without ever signing a contract. It's also a city bowl problem, with rents sky-rocketing and people willing to pay anything to live there. I am not. So, for now, I am on the peninsula, with my batterie de cuisine, two bags of clothes and the one I love, in his snug house. A fire in the grate, birds gorging themselves on a peanut-butter-filled pine cone in the garden, key lime pie and coffee.

Driving over the mountain pass yesterday, all misty and sparkling, the waterfalls cascaded down the cliffs, ending in billows of foam. And I remembered something that I forgot to tell you about: the sound of thousands of bees when you stand on the edge of a canola field.

So loud the air vibrates.

Spring Chicken.

When you spend a few days in a place like Moorreesburg, you need to snap out of your city ways fast. The townsfolk greet you in shops, on pavements, in cars. Yes, as you drive down the main street, other drivers nod and smile. There is the doffing of caps and much friendly gesticulating: No, you - you go first.

This is the small town mentality of my childhood and now that I am back in the city I miss it.

We shot in a few different houses - it always amazes me that people let us in so easily. You get to see bits and pieces of other lives - something I will never tire of.

And you hear stories. I wish I could go back with my notebook, but mostly there just isn't time. 

In a living room with rosy wallpaper, there is a sepia portrait of a movie-star-handsome man with a twirled moustache. Her father, she says. He escaped from one of the prisoner of war camps by sewing himself a khaki uniform and casually walking away. Then he became a spy in the British Navy.

When she was born, he attached the cockpit of a fighter plane to his open Willys Jeep, so that he could transport her in safety.

After the shoot, she says to me: "I'm so proud of my dogs and my chickens... they behaved so well." This after we had a huge crew eating lunch in the garden, wardrobe and make-up and extras lounging about as if they owned the place.

It was a commercial for a colonel. We were divided into two groups: us - the worker ants and them - the chicken people. The chicken people could not talk to us, would deign only to speak to the director.  I noticed a little voodoo doll tucked into the wardrobe lady's bag. It steadily filled with pins.

It's a tough world sometimes, this film business, and so disenchanted have I become, that when the director walked onto our second set and whooped with joy, I thought for a moment he was being sarcastic. After that, the day turned sunshiny and the Namaqua daisies opened wide. 

Home was on the outskirts of town, on an ancient farm. The dogs followed as I walked down to the dam. It was covered in waterblommetjies - the edible flowers of an aquatic plant, similar in flavour to a French bean. If I had known, my supper menu would have been different.

It had been a long time since since I cooked a meal for eight. The Saint Bernard watched mournfully from the threshold.

Every day I drove past a field of juicy clover and saw a strange sight: a single bay stallion with his own flock of sheep. They did everything together and made me ring with delight.

In the dark mornings, there was ice on the cars. The mountains are still snow-capped. But there's that feeling of Spring, just around the corner.

Finger licking good.

The rain is gushing down the mountain, streaming down the buildings.

The Liesbeeck River is swollen and unctuous, a dark olive green.

Gloved hands every morning, dragon breath at night.

In the apartment block across the road, the students forget to buy electricity. I see them eating breakfast by candle light.

Back in the fast world of commercials, the people are on fire - they bounce like rubber balls. Reminiscent of the stock market, ideas gain and lose favour, sometimes within minutes.

It never rains, but it pours.

We are waging a velvet war: art department, production and agency.

On the way to Moorreesburg, the canola fields are sunshine yellow. The mountains still blue and covered in snow. In the countryside, time really does move in a different way.

The time has come for me to pack up my collections and put them away for a while. At home I walk new paths between towers of boxes, rolls of cardboard and bubble wrap.

Already I feel lighter.

A Gypsy life for me!

In a borrowed tent.

I am steadily becoming obsessed with history. Those quirky stories of everyday life that get lost in time. The long legged man's great grandfather was a commander in the Boer War. He remembers his grandfather telling the children stories that his father had told him. Nobody wrote them down. I wish I could go back in time and take notes.

Recently in Churchhaven, I found this old milk bottle buried in the sand. Perhaps from the 60's or even the 50's, it bears the instruction: This bottle costs more than ten cents. Please rinse and return promptly.

I could find no information about the Union Dairy Farm - according to the bottle, they were on the Ou Kaapse Weg in Tokai.

My generation all remembers having milk and juice delivered in the morning. The feeling of pressing down the foil cap with your thumb...

Over lunch at the Chapman's Peak Hotel, my friend the potter and haiku writer told me that he remembers this:

he grew up in East London and early mornings were heralded by a barefoot Zulu milkman, who would come along pushing his red and white painted wooden handcart, milk bottles clinking.

His name was Milky and he wore blue overalls with Model Dairy embroidered on the back, and copper bangles around his wrists and his ankles. In the winter, he had a lantern hanging from his cart.

My friend also told me that his daughter had given up her long years of Philosophy studies to devote her life to the baking of biscuits.

That sounds like a wonderful life to me. 

through a hole

in a borrowed tent

the Milky Way

- Steve Shapiro