Heatwave

What a day in Cape Town! A summer scorcher, the kind of day when you should be lying under a tree looking at the sky through the leaves. But no, after this morning's exploits in the garden with the porcupine, it was out with the spade and some large pieces of wire fencing, concrete blocks, wooden poles, metal grid sheets and anything else handy to build a barricade. A wire mesh fence is nothing to a porcupine - he just unravels it after biting through a single strand. So that was what I call a sweatiferous bit of work, although Robert did help.

He of course was exhausted, having gone off to buy a Christmas tree, which reaches the ceiling and protrudes about a metre and a half into the room. We love a big tree, and he and Katherine then had to decorate it while I slaved away at the computer earning my daily bread.

All the windows and doors had to be closed or only open a crack, because of the return of Bobby and Jane,   with Billy-Sue in tow (don't know if it's a he or a she, so that name will have to do). For the non-Afrikaans speakers among you, a baboon is a bobbejaan, hence my generic names for whoever passes through my kitchen. I feel we should be on first-name terms - after all, they are helping themselves to the food from my table and I don't want to be an ungracious hostess.

But now, as the evening draws to a close, a cool breeze is drifting off the sea and into the now open windows (B, J and B-S have headed for the crags to their sleeping place) and a heavy shore break thunders its message across the airwaves - news of a storm in the South Atlantic, but we won't be seeing it. Feathery ice clouds await the setting of the sun, to capture the last colours of the spectrum as we head into another peaceful night on the edge of the ocean.