Capeautumn

Winter is sweeping in early this year. It’s been a bit dreary since late February.

It’s been a few moons since my last windmill to blockhouse walk. And wouldn’t you know, the windmill is complete. Fully restored at last. Ok maybe they still have one sail to raise. It was the Cape Argus cycle race - which I’d forgotten. It’s South Africa’s most prestigious race. I’m a what? A bicyclist rather than a cyclist. I have mixed feelings about the sports cycling community. They are arguably a hindrance weirdly to bicycles being prioritised as a mode of transport. But the distaste for them frequently goes dangerously too far.

Skitten making use of its little tower chamber again.

This joint has never been more important. One of the few live music venues left in Observatory. Closed during COVID but then reopened under new management. Ever since the first juke box and then the first disco back in the 50s, the eons old practice of live music recitals has effectively been rendered obsolete. But by making a big show out of it, that death has been postponed. But it’s often quite a hard sell against the very flamboyant and immersive forms of entertainment it now has to compete with. But for those of us who love it and do it, there’s no real substitute. ...

Astonishingly, some suburban houses in Cape Town have retained their original low walls without their inhabitants being murdered nightly, presumably. Though I also know it’s a relief when people don’t regularly hop into your yard. Cape Town is a cruel city. And being “middle class” here (actually being in the top 5% nationally) puts you in a weird place in terms of how to react to the countless people struggling at the margins. There’s a lot of ignoring, pretence, occasional sympathy, and the ever-popular blaming-the-poor-for-their-poverty. ...

Nataraja dances in the dawn light coming in our bedroom window.

More Autumn skies.

Observatory begins to settle into winter.

A truer love you’ll seldom see. The weather is beginning to turn in Cape Town. And Skitten is far more tolerant of this kind of thing than she was a few weeks ago. It’s my birthday which, for symbolic reasons, means it’s Skitten’s birthday too. It’s 14 now. A venerable creature. It still doesn’t know anything. A little less feisty and not quite as adventuresome. But otherwise very much the same strange little animal that @withoutaleaf sent me from Maatjiesfontein back in 2007.

@withoutaleaf’s baking triumph. Three days and about 300kgs of butter. By the time we emerge, many of us will have developed a host of refined skills that will probably all be useless in the cannibal wasteland that will follow. We should really be practising barbecuing human hearts and syphoning deisel from speeding trucks while shooting lever-action shotguns with our free hand. Ah well, I was never going to achieve the rank of warlord. More likely I’d be food, second-class.