World peace

 There will be no peace while Man pursues his own interests at the expense of his fellow man.
 While there is no compassion for the oppressed, the abused, the bullied; while there is rejection of those who dare to be different, who refuse to conform to society's straitjacket and who are prepared to stand up and be counted; while there is judgment and fingerpointing, superiority and sneering, intolerance and selfishness, greed and hatred, Mankind will fall further and further into the abyss of fear.
 The only way to climb out is by understanding that we all come from one source and that we are all aspects of each other.  To hurt another is to hurt yourself. Do you feel good at the expense of another's feelings about himself?  When your interaction with people brings you only good feelings, you will realise that fear has no power over you.  The way in which you react to every situation will dictate the result, and the only result that you would seek would be one that makes you feel best about yourself.
 Everything you say and do is a statement to the world of who you are. By making a conscious decision to strive only for an outcome of the greatest sense of happiness, you will have discovered the way to a life where you are responsible for your own happiness and can live without fear.
  Without fear, there is no aggression.
  Without aggression, there is no war.
  Without war, there is peace.
Peace = harmony = togetherness = unity = oneness.  We are all one.

One of our cars is a Golf. It has nothing that can go wrong. No electric windows, no onboard computer, no air-conditioning, no power steering, no airbags. Just a basic car. It is very nippy but the drive is like a tin can on wheels. When you lift the bonnet there is plenty of room to put your arm through the engine parts - a far cry from my old Beemer which was wall-to-wall engine.  However, the sound system is fantastic and makes up for the lack of driving pleasure.
 One day as I idled in the rush hour (now there's a misnomer) traffic going up Wynberg Hill, I noticed steam coming out from the sides of the bonnet. Aaarrgghh!  A quick look at the temperature gauge showed nothing amiss, so I hung in there until I eventually reached the parking garage in Claremont. As I turned off the engine, it was as though I had flipped the release knob on a pressure cooker.  Steam blasted out from every available exit of the engine and a large puddle formed underneath the car.  I decide to leave it to cool and go off to work to ponder my next move.
  Later I eased over to the nearest garage (I thought it would be a good place to leave it) and parked under a cool tree before opening the bonnet.  A quick call to my husband (aka He Who Can Fix Anything) to summon him to the scene - in the meantime, I got a bottle of water from the garage shop (for me, not the car). While I waited, I stuck my head into the engine compartment to see what I could see and (I kid you not) immediately noticed a hole in the bottom of the engine block which looked as though a bolt or suchlike should be there.
 He Who Can Fix Anything duly arrived and I pointed out the apparent defect. "Oh, the welsh plug has corroded." What a team!  He sent me off to the nearest motor part dealer to buy a new plug. Living dangerously, I bought two. They cost R8!
 In a few taps of a hammer and a refill of the water, I was on the road again.  If I had taken it to a mechanic, I'm fairly sure I would now have a new cylinder head, water pump and radiator!

Italy #2

Siena. August 17. Just missed the Palio - run the day before. Poor planning. Temperature 34 deg. Humidity 70%. We move from gelateria to gelateria. Thoughts turn to something more substantial. Hard work tramping up and down hilltop town. Man passes on electric wheels - sensible.
  Spot deli - dive inside to escape sun. Festooned with huge fake hams. Why?  Usual ham and cheese pannini - 6 euros.  But wait! Delectable aroma from kitchen.  Enter chef bearing half a pig.  Crisp, glistening golden skin. Succulent herb-laden porchetta.  One of those, please!

  Mmmm. Sit at side of road, feet in gutter.  Mmmm. Bus goes by our faces.  Too hot to care.  Mmmm. Food of the gods. Envious glances from ham-and-cheesers.  Mmmm.  Share crumbs with family.  Mmmm.
 Still dream about it.  Will go back one day for more.

Fresh fish from the freezer

  I was given some fish today.  While I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, unfortunately it did not come packed neatly in a carton with interleaving plastic to facilitate a quick toss in the batter and into the frying pan. No, what I received was more like a seafood sculpture.  Three large whole fish had obviously been tossed straight into the freezer where they had wound themselves into a loving embrace which no man shall put asunder. These fish, tightly frozen together to form one big fish, cannot fit into my fridge because they are 3 feet long. I dare not leave it in the sink because I have visions of the cats chewing on it in the night.  The only solution is to cut off the head and tail.
  I place the frozen mass under the tap and run a gentle stream of water along the groove where they have fused together.  Grasping a sharp knife in one hand and gripping a fish head with the other, I start sawing.  After 10 minutes of concerted effort, success - the head is in the sink.  I chop off the tail at the other end and now have one tail-less fish and one headless fish stuck to a whole fish.  Still doesn't fit in the fridge.  At last I am able to get the blade into a gap and separate the fish, take off the remaining heads and tails and put them in the fridge to thaw.  I mention that at this stage almost the entire kitchen is covered in scales and bits of sawn up fish and I have broken out in a light sweat.
  Tomorrow I will be able to descale, skin and fillet them and then, joy of joys, batter and fry them. You can only imagine what the kitchen will look like after that, with trails of batter running across the stove plates and bursts of oil popping out of the pan on contact with the moisture.  Of course, it will taste so delicious it will be worth the pain.
  So thank you for your kind and generous gift, but please spare a thought for the poor fishwife next time you toss your catch so carelessly into the freezer.  I'll pay you to clean it.

Plaster disaster

I needed a plaster the other day. An altercation with the lid of an open tin of tuna resulted in a deep slice through the cuticle of my index finger, the part closest to the bone. You wouldn't think there was room for a blood vessel there, but the blood flowed as though I had put a pick through the carotid artery.
With my finger tightly bound in a tea towel, I scratched a box of plasters out of the cupboard. I managed to open it and a wad of plasters cascaded out, resembling those old sets of postcards tourists would buy at curio shops.  I snapped one off with my teeth and set about opening it.  Have you ever tried to open anything with your thumb and third finger?  Couldn't work out how to open it, so just used my teeth again. Eventually I succeeded in extracting the plaster from the wrapper.  It had four covering flaps but no instructions.  I pulled one off the sticky side, which immediately curled into itself and became a useless blob. I pulled the other half off and stuck it on my finger, but then had no corresponding half to hold it down.  I pulled the top flaps off and couldn't identify what purpose they had served.
I wrapped my finger, still bleeding profusely, back in the tea towel, threw the useless plaster in the bin and pulled another one off the cascade to repeat the process.  Finally I got a mangled plaster on to staunch the flow. If it had been the carotid artery, I would have bled to death by now.
I cannot imagine who designed this so-called basic first aid item, as the conclusion is:  useless in an emergency.  I think the best idea is to open every plaster long before you need them and lay them flat on greaseproof paper, ready to be lifted straight onto the wound with the minimum of fuss. I am sure there are many mothers who can identify with the plaster disaster!
(NB: to those who think you could apply a plaster to a burst carotid artery:  do not try this at home.)

Cleaning out the garage

Spent the afternoon sorting out the garage. again. How is it possible to accumulate so much stuff? Fishing rods unused for 35 years after the first overwind. 3 gearboxes and a V6 engine. A bicycle that no one has ridden since 2008. Two rusted microwaves, not working. 3 sets of racing tyres. A TV set. 3 Persian carpets waiting for the cats and dogs to go to pet heaven so that I can put them down on the floor again (I don't expect to even remember the patterns by the time I see them after all these years). Mother-in-law's old imbuia dressing table set with stool and two side cupboards 3 brass portholes and a ship's bell. Enough wood to build a small cottage in the back yard - that's why we've got it of course - our retirement home. A rope that can moor a trawler. An old safe that we bought on auction and were quite sure contained a stash of jewellery or valuable old share certificates - it took two days with oxyacetylene torches to cut through the door and find nothing inside! Outboard motors, oilskins, oars and other fishing paraphernalia. Thousands of nails, screws, washers, nuts, bolts, bits of wire, rubber, electric cord, piping. A fully equipped bar and accompanying decorations, racing trophies.  Wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling shelving filled with STUFF.  Definition of stuff:  anything that fills an empty space.

All of these things don't really qualify for garage space, but have found their place amongst a collection of tools that a hardware store would envy and, oh yes, the 8 cars that live in the garage.  We found one at the back that we had forgotten about.

One day we will have a garage sale to end all garage sales. Then we can convert the garage into a 3-bedroomed house. I can't wait.

We decided to have a cup of tea and sit under the milkwood tree outside and leave it for another day. 

Italy #1 - This is a long one!

A few years back I stayed with my nephew, Michael, in Milan.  He is a keen mountain-biker so one day he packed his bike and me in the car and we set off for the Alps. Eventually the road began winding up a long, steep, narrow valley with low cloud cover.  We were going up to where he snowboarded in winter and he had never seen it without snow.  Now he was going to take the last skilift of the season to the glacier at the top, because he thought it would be a good idea to ride down the mountain.
Suddenly there was a break in the clouds and my jaw dropped.  Straight ahead, reaching thousands of metres into the sky, was an awe-inspiring lump of rock which I recognised instantly. "That's the Matterhorn!" I squeaked. "That's in Switzerland!" A few hours before we were on the plains of the Po valley. It's quite a challenge to take in how small Europe is and how immense the Alps are. "Oh yes, but we're on the Italian side, so it's called something else." As if that matter(horn)ed.  Familiarity breeds contempt and all that.
 We got to the end of the road, to the rather ugly resort town (can't remember, Cerveto??) which didn't have a magical layer of snow to redeem it.  Full of massive Heidi-style chalets/apartments/hotels.  Bleak, uninviting and rather shabby.
 Michael's plan: we go up to the 3rd station (can't go further because then we're in Switzerland and I didn't take my passport), then he'll ride down and take the lift back up as many times as possible before they closed (it was the last day of August and everything would shut at the end of the day for maintenance). So up we went.  Milan was 34 degrees. Top of ski lift 8 degrees. Same clothes - shorts, shirt, sandals, thin jacket. He could have warned me.  However, the view was too spectacular to worry about the temperature.
 Michael got on his bike, said "See you later" and was gone. And there I stood, completely alone, at the foot of the Matterhorn, 3500m up in the Alps, next to a glacier. Not a person in sight, not a bird, not a blade of grass, not a breath of wind. Not a sound.  The mountain and I were one. 
 I eventually noticed that amongst the grey gravel there were actually minute plants, like succulents and other tough vegetation with pretty flowers, none much higher than 3cm.  But apart from that, bleak. And the mountain towered still higher.
 I decided it would be best to go back down to Level 2 station, so I went back inside and got into one of the little cablecars.  Did I mention that I am reluctant to climb a ladder? And that on the way up the cablecar had stopped for a few minutes and we had hung above the steep slopes, swinging gently to and fro?  The prospect of doing this again was not exciting, but I couldn't walk down.  A brainwave struck (all this communing with nature) and I put my eye to the viewfinder of my camera, effectively blocking out my surroundings and allowing my brain to forget the journey while it focused on the smaller view.  Try it, it works.
 No sign of Michael on the way down, but lots of dangerous looking paths at the edge of precipices. For all I knew, he could have gone over a cliff.  Did I have the car keys?
 How surreal is the next scene:  I'm walking through a desolate ski station, 3000m up the Matterhorn, nobody in sight, alone in a place I've never been before.  Down the steps comes Michael, pushing his bike, passes me, says "I'm going back up, See you later" and he's gone.  I'm alone again.  What were the chances of us passing on that mountain?  Synchronicity?
 There was still a lot of cloud cover and I hadn't got a good shot of the Matterhorn. I went into the Ladies toilets and on the wall was a magnificent tourism poster of the mountain bathed in sunshine, surrounded by Alpine meadows and a gushing stream.  I took a picture of it and photoshopped the edges - everyone thinks I was there in beautiful weather and am a really good photographer.  For the record, they were the worst toilets I have ever been in, and I could write a book on the toilets of Europe, or maybe a blog...
 I count that day, when I was privileged to stand alone on that immense mountain in that huge silence, as one of the most important and valuable experiences of my life.