REVELATIONS AND REVELRY

A conversation with my sister last Saturday morning:

K: haha thats awesome. nothing new really! just trying to sort out my life after here! nothing exciting though. except i saw a baboon outside my front door, that was pretty funny

S:Yes I saw that about the baboon!! Why didn’t you let it come inside?

K: because they are very aggressive, eat all your food, poo in your bed. then wipe the poo on your walls, destroy everything. and then come back every day to do it again with their friends!!!!!!!!!!

S:Oh my God!!!! LOL

K: yep yep i know. hence my speed at shutting my door!!

S:How did you know they do all that? I wouldn’t have had a clue!!

K: because people have told me! they are very clever things, and a big issue here. they even employ people called baboon monitors to chase round after them with paintball guns and flares to keep them up in the mountains away from houses!

S:Why would they poo in your bed??

K: im not sure, i think they poo as they eat, and the bed looks comfy for them so they sit there??

S:I’m really laughing!!! I wish you’d let it in!

K: no!!! i would not want to clean that up! and can you imagine the next day when they come knocking at my door?!

S:Do they really come back?!?

K: yes! with all their friends!!

These messages are the the prelude to my sister’s blog and made me cry with laughter. It’s certainly not my idea of a party lifestyle. She lives and works in South Africa and swims with Great White sharks daily. Not content with that danger, she also has baboons apparently popping round to her house for a cup of tea  and a quick poo…….

BY KIMBERLEY:

August 1st

I just saw my first baboon!!! Since I arrived here in South Africa I have been convinced they were just a legend. Everyone talks about them, but I had never seen one. Guests and co-workers would laugh at my ineffectual sightings so much so that I just decided baboons must be more like the Loch Ness monster – everyone talks about them, but no one sees. Even when my friend Tamsyn took pity on me and drove me to places where they ‘always were’ there was never one. Or any sign of them! I had heard the stories about them breaking into peoples’ houses and offices, smearing their faeces all over the walls, eating everyone’s’ food, but there was no real proof! I also live in the mountains exactly where they are meant to live – on the boat to a customer the other day Gary described it as ‘the bat cave behind the waterfall’. Its actually a beautiful little one room place, top right hand corner of Simonstown with a complete glass frontage overlooking False Bay and my next-door neighbour being a waterfall. It is my second favourite place in the world. My first, obviously, is Seal Island at sunrise. But back to my baboon! So for 4 months now I’ve been searching, going around Cape Point, looking and not finding. Today, my landlady and I had a long discussion about the baboons as apparently the monitors – men that walk around with paintball guns and flares shooting at them to keep them away from residential areas, had been in our area for 10 days and I hadn’t noticed a thing! Obviously I knew my baboon sighting just wasn’t meant to be. Later that day, sitting at home with my landladies little dog Zuzu on my lap I happen to glance up and see some huge brown ‘thing’ walking along the top of my railing on my balcony. It then turns and looks right at me – in through my OPEN front door-. I’m not sure I’ve ever moved so fast in my life as the realisation set in; leaping across my whole house (its actually not very far, maybe 5 metres…), slamming my front door shut and locking it in one fast move. The stories of baboons taking over whole houses with their troops, poo’ing over the walls, being completely unafraid of females (humans!), and basically leaving total destruction in their wake helped me move that little bit faster. I really wanted to see one, I’m not so sure I wanted it to be in my home. Poor Zuzu stared at the baboon and then hid behind me for safety, everywhere I went she followed like a little shadow. Pretty sure she didn’t want to be mistaken for food, such a tiny little dog! The baboon could have held her in one hand, and whisked her away for a baboon barbeque or to join the troop! Neither of us were going to let that happen, and happily (didn’t think id say that…) the baboon went away. I picked Zuzu up, ran up the flight of stairs to her official house and jumped in the door to find the landladies daughter shouting ‘careful, baboons!’. She had also been watching the one eat an onion in her garden, and thought Zuzu had gone forever. Within seconds she was on the phone to her mother telling her the emergency was over, the baboons had not stolen the dog and her mother could return to the party. Thankfully I had returned the teeny dog to its rightful home, me back into mine and all was well. But I do feel like I’ve reached a milestone today, I can properly say that South Africa is my home, and I, Kimberley Bushe, have seen a baboon. I’m also pretty proud as looking back over it I would have thought my first reaction would be to grab my camera for proof, but thankfully it was the safety of myself and my home! Well done me . No poo-stained walls today.

               Something peculiar is happening this week and for a while I wasn’t sure that I liked it. For the first time in approximately a decade I have only myself (and the dog) to look after. The eldest girl is skiing in Switzerland with the school – a fact that I can now mention nonchalantly because she is almost home but for the past month or so has caused me to have recurring, jumbled nightmares about ski lifts, trees and fractured tibias – and the youngest girl is abroad in Portugal with her father.

I looked forward to this week with a mixture of horror and joy. On the one hand there was the travel to get through. Every time a child of mine climbs aboard a plane I become convinced that they are going to die and nothing will dissuade me from that, so the duration of the flight finds me pacing the floor, hyperventilating and self-medicating with wine. In comparison the thought of the eldest girl spending twenty-four hours on a coach bothers me not. Rough ferry crossing at midnight? Not a problem. Speeding down through France? Bring it on! Winding through tiny, slippery Alpine roads? But of course. On the other hand a week of freedom spilled itself tantalisingly out in front of me……. A whole week with no childcare, no meals to cook, no bedtimes to do, no baths to run, no stories to read, no tidying up to do, no conversations about the tooth fairy or summer exams to have. It…..would…..just……be…..me. I kept picking up my period of freedom and looking at it, examining its structure for faults. It couldn’t be as simple as just being an enjoyable thing, could it? I mean, my entire life revolves around my children; ergo I have no life for a week. But slowly, I began to think differently. No children = no restrictions. I can stay up as late as I want, I can go out whenever I want, I can watch television all day if the mood takes me (it doesn’t), I don’t have to get dressed and what eventually dawned on me was that I would have endless creative space to write. Shamefully, I had been putting off doing anything with my manuscript because I knew there was something wrong with it. Half of it I loved, but half of it was awful. How then to match the two sides? Damned if I knew, so I didn’t actually open the document for something approaching four months. I thought about it a lot and began to concoct vague plans for remedying it but no bit of me dared to read the thing. So with my week of freedom looming I took a deep breath, gathered up my laptop, iPad, phone and dog, plus a few jumpers and no socks as it turns out, and drove for two hours to an unfamiliar house where I planned to resurrect the manuscript. The main draw of this house is that there is no internet, which is good for two reasons. One: it stops me from constantly hopping on twitter or Facebook and becoming distracted, and two: if I want wi-fi I have to go to the nearest pub. Which thrilled me because I’ve never owned such a bona fide excuse before now. It’s like the time that the only place that was warm enough for me to be comfortable was the local Joules shop.

Before I left I made a chilli for a friend one night and severely misjudged the amount of chilli powder so it had all the heat of Dante’s hell, and then whilst he was consuming it he turned over something black with his fork and said “Er – is this a leaf?” The answer was no, it was where I’d burned it to the bottom of the pan, but it was then that I realised quite how wrapped up I had become in regressing to my teenage years for a week. My mind had drifted away from catering and towards indulgence. I planned to do little but eat, sleep and write with the occasional foray to the pub. Basically I wanted to emulate Branwell Bronte, but on a lesser scale. And so far it’s going quite well. I braved the horror of my first twenty-five thousand words immediately and plunged straight into serious editing and re-writes. Approximately five hours later I emerged triumphant. Parts of the manuscript were indeed as dire as I’d remembered them, in fact some bits actually made me cringe to read, but I ruthlessly deleted and re-wrote until I achieved inner, writerly, peace. I’ve more or less marshalled my characters into line, and one of my main protagonists is now in possession of a much more satisfying personality. She swears, drinks whiskey, wears the skinniest of skinny jeans like a good girl and gives those who deserve them withering stares and says things like “Honestly, Kate?”

And when I’m not writing, I am reading voraciously. I’ve just finished an absolutely brilliant book called “The Last Time I Saw You” by Eleanor Moran, it’s so brilliant I urge you all to buy it immediately. Clever, funny, sad, utterly engaging and wonderfully written – it is genuinely one of the best books I’ve read for a long time. I shall be keeping my eye on her. And from that I went to Caitlin Moran’s “How to be a Woman”. I’ve just paused for a few seconds whilst I think about exactly what comment to pass on this work. It’s hard when all I’ve read so far is about periods, breasts, pubic hair and pornography – all of which she discusses with varying degrees of affection. I think the sentence that has appalled me most so far (quite an accolade) is “Of course I’ve tasted my own menstrual blood”, which is so horrifying it took my breath away. Germaine Greer has a lot to answer for. But I suppose, begrudgingly, it is a clever book. No-one could describe me as an ardent feminist but Caitlin is a very funny lady and holds some very funny views – which makes for interesting reading. However on the whole I’m quite looking forward to finishing that book and beginning Adele Parks’ latest one.

And meanwhile I shall be mainly be living in my imaginary hinterland, populated by characters that I have made up, doing things that I create for them to do. Put like that, it doesn’t sound very healthy does it? But never mind, as long as I can channel my inner peace then I don’t care. Some people achieve it through tai-chi, some through drugs, but my own personal method is swearing quietly, pressing delete a lot and sipping at a glass of Fleurie.   

PS. I’m not quite brave enough to leave this post without apologising to my parents for the title of it. Sorry.

This morning is not going particularly well for me so far. It’s the one morning of the week that I do not have to get up and do a school run and I am still awake at some godforsaken hour. Why does that always happen? And to make matters worse I don’t even know where I am. The thing next to me tells me that I am in Wadworthshire. Or at least I presume it does because it says ‘Welcome to Wadworthshire’. Where on earth is that?? I’ve never heard of it before. In addition to which I am having to write this sitting in front of a mirror which, after last night, is not a good thing. There are a whole load of teabags next to me as well, with improbable sounding ingredients. Sanguinello orange, for example. Since when did that form part of the basis of tea? As far as tea is concerned – and this is the one time in my life I will ever say the next part of this sentence – I am a builder. I like it plain, strong and mostly unadulterated with milk. And certainly unadulterated with sanguinello orange. Actually, tea is one of the main things I have noticed about being single. For ages I continued to get up in the morning and automatically make a pot of it. And then a few weeks later I noticed that I was only having time to drink one cup and the rest was being poured away. Gone are the days when I had time to leisurely sit around drinking tea in the morning; now I am in sole charge of breakfast, hair-brushing, locating uniform and referee-ing the early morning fights, which clearly is a glorious way to start my day. Yesterday’s fight was about Valentine’s Day. Molly (11) was busy teasing Alice (6) about which boy she would send a card to. Alice was getting more and more irate at the idea that it was compulsory just because Molly said so, when she said something that stopped Molly in her tracks. I actually felt the pause from where I was getting dressed as the whole argument hung and spun in the air for a moment like so much dust. And then Molly shouted “Mummy! Tell Alice that she can’t send a Valentine’s Day card to a girl!” Alice: 1, Molly: 0.

Another big thing I’ve noticed about being single is the cooking. I know I mentioned this in my last blog but that’s because this is a major thing for me. For years I have neglected what is traditionally viewed as part of the female role and now I am determined and eager to pick it up again and become better than I ever been at catering. Before the girls get gout.  So this week I decided to make moussaka. Don’t ask me why, I have only a vague recollection of eating it once, about twenty years ago, and I’m not sure I liked it then. But I found a recipe online, scanned it for ingredients and transferred them into my Ocado shopping list which was delivered on the Monday. I knew it was going to take a while so I set aside most of Wednesday afternoon to make it so I could enjoy the anticipation, and I dedicated myself to the experience properly. I put the radio on, tied my hair up, changed into loungewear and my wonderfully soft Joules slipper boot things and when it was a nice relaxing atmosphere I brought the recipe up again on my iPad. Or I thought I did. The first issue was that I couldn’t actually locate the initial recipe that I’d used. But no matter – one moussaka recipe is the same as another, no? No would appear to be the answer because the one I found when I needed to cook had about five extra ingredients that the other one didn’t. But never mind! When you have bay leaves and cinnamon who needs fresh thyme and allspice? I’d already had to go to the butcher earlier in the day and buy a significant quantity of minced lamb because I discovered that the amount I’d bought from Waitrose online roughly fitted on a teaspoon when it arrived. So I lined up my ingredients; chopped tomatoes, two onions because I didn’t have a ‘large’ one, lamb, all manner of herbs, aubergines and whatever else there was, I can’t remember the rest. I began ‘browning’ the lamb and sautéing the onion and then realised that I needed to chop the aubergines up. Do you know how long it takes to chop four medium aubergines? Because I do. Then they need to be sprinkled with salt and sit in a colander to draw out any bitter juices. Well I hunted through the cupboards but no colander could I find so I settled on a sieve and piled up four medium aubergines sprinkled with salt. By which time I’d burnt the lamb. So I added it to the onion anyway and began administering the herbs that I had. Garlic cloves were called for, three of them, but I didn’t have any of those so I grabbed the garlic salt instead and shook that in. How much garlic salt equates to three garlic cloves? I had no idea. Then next I added the chopped tomatoes, registering as I did so that I needed ‘2 x 400g’. I examined the one tin I had and swiftly realised that I needed two. So I climbed onto the worktop and hunted through the cupboards for a second time. My luck was in! I found a second tin lurking at the back of a shelf. It had expired in 2010 but really, who was going to know? No-one that was going to eat it, I’d make sure of that. In went the tomatoes and the next thing I had to do was de-glaze the pan I’d burnt the lamb in. With wine. De-glaze? I stared at the words for a few moments wondering if it was strictly necessary and then remembered my fresh commitment to cooking and googled ‘de-glazing’. I discovered that it basically meant boiling the wine in the pan. Which seemed an awful waste of 6 fl oz of wine, but far be it from me to argue with Antony Worrall Thompson. So de-glaze I did and added that to my bubbling moussaka mixture. It was about this point that I remembered that I really don’t like minced lamb. Properly don’t like it. The smell from the moussaka was a bit of the herbs and garlic (nice) but mainly the lamb (vile). But perhaps it would be better with the aubergines? After drawing out the bitter juices I had to rinse and pat dry the sliced aubergine and I can honestly say that I was more careful and tender with the vegetable than I am when drying my smallest girl after her bath. I had high hopes for this aubergine; it was make or break for the moussaka. After frying the aubergine (in wholemeal flour because I didn’t have any plain stuff) it was rapidly approaching the pinnacle point where I would construct the dish! Create the moussaka. Put together my lamb mixture, aubergine, béchamel sauce, parmesan and gruyere cheese and bake it for an hour. I’d thought by this point that I would be able to relax. Cooking would be done, I could clean the kitchen and await the results of my endeavours with a certain amount of pride. But no. Two things happened at this point; one I remembered that I had to go and collect Alice from school, and two I spied a lone onion sitting unchopped on the side. My plan for two onions masquerading as one large one had failed at its inception by virtue of the fact that one hadn’t made it into the pan. What to do? Child or onion? Abandonment or  dinner?  Swearing, I picked up a knife, dealt with the onion then picked up my keys and drove the mile to the school. It was as I fled across the playground that I realised that I was still wearing what were essentially pyjamas. There was little I could do however except front it out, which I did – not even batting an eyelid when the mother who opened the door for me gave me a very strange look. I marched in, grabbed my child and left.

The end of this story is something of an anti-climax. I did create the moussaka, I did bake it and it was eaten. But not by me. I found the entire taste completely revolting and the only bit I could bear to consume was the cheese on top. But like a good mother I did insist that the girls finished theirs and I’m happy to report that they’ve survived. However I think it’s best for all if I retire gracefully from the field of experimental cooking and go back to where I naturally belong – on the sofa, Domino’s menu in one hand and 6 fl oz of wine in the other.