Family Funday

Today was the annual foray to Somerset West for my cousin’s birthday – a day I look forward to with extreme pleasure, as it is a rare opportunity to catch up with a part of the family who we don’t see enough of. (To the rest of you out there, we would love to see you all as well, but the air tickets are too much and as for the visa fees…).

The house is a beautiful, rambling old-fashioned home with a park-like garden dominated by an old oak (not my cousin, he’s not an old oke). The whole area is a leafy suburb, the trees much larger than on the Peninsula – perhaps they get a little more rain or the soil is more fertile, but more likely less wind – these things are important in this neck of the woods where rain can fall on one place and nowhere else. And if it weren’t for the trees, the heat would have been completely unbearable. Being only a short distance from the sea, one would expect a cooling influence, but somehow just the humidity lingers and while the younger cousins and a cavort of kids splashed, swam and wallowed in the sparkling pool, us oldies (lol) preferred the welcoming coolness of the interior, where we could loll on the sofa or in a rocking chair after an excellent late lunch which catered for every taste, from the health conscious to the not-needing-to-watch-their-weight.

Dogs of all shapes, sizes and stages of decrepitude participated enthusiastically in the proceedings and a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon passed by in a flash, until the phone rang and He Who Can Fix Anything (who had stayed at home, fixing things) asked whether he should set up a floodlight as we had to put the garage door back on before tomorrow. In the face of such sarcasm, there was a scramble to move four cars out of the driveway (of course, we had parked right in the front) so that we could hit the road, and I am happy to say that within an hour and a half we had got all the way back to Kommetjie and installed the door.

Now it is load-shedding (a euphemism for turning out the lights so that we can give free electricity to a neighbouring country) and I am typing this in the dark, but hey, the silence is wonderful, only the crashing of the waves, the prospect of a bright moon on the horizon and a gentle, cooling breeze from the sea. Sleep tight everyone.