Fujifilmxe1

A couple of #latergrams. Got to meet up with these ever delightful people a few weeks ago when we went to go see an Irma Stern exhibition. The knitter made us cute octopus plushies that we shall treasure.

Early morning Trinket, aka Bun. With the rolling blackouts due to our corrupt and negligent state power provider we’ve been using candles a fair bit. Bun can’t seem to learn that these lights are too spicy 🌶 for her and keeps singeing her whiskers.

Newlands Forest was mighty damp after the huge amount of rain we had last week. To cross the streams with dry feet I had to do some tricky hops on slippery rocks. I amazed myself by managing to cross three of these rain gorged torrents without falling in. A second mountain biker alerted me to their presence with a bike bell. That makes two… ever. It’s such a tiny, inexpensive object but it conveys so much respect to the other mountain users. Most of them though, are not well-loved by the rest of us. I have a bell on my bike just for getting myself around, let along tearing down narrow, twisting tracks. Sport riders in Cape Town need to be better. ...

The memorial to ruthless imperialism and capitalism. Even sharks respect power - it’s a really basic thing to revere. It’s much more appropriate to a sophisticated primate to revere kindness and cooperation. Well, at least people can enjoy the free public space and every generation of kids can ride the scaled down imitations of the Trafalgar Square lions - none of them thinking for a moment about a dusty old Victorian narcissist.

Despite having some expensive sunglasses ruined by the wind ripping them off my shirt and skidding them - lenses down - for 50m across a tarred road, the irritation I woke up with couldnt stand up to Table Mountain Park at dawn. This has to be among the best city parks on Earth. I’m not quite fit enough to run up the steep mountainside to the “King’s Blockhouse” (a grandiose name for a very tiny little fort) so, since I was scrambling anyway, I could take my camera. I was remembering how this seemed like quite a big hike even as a teenager. I was clearly very unfit then.

Last Sunday we went to the Paarl Arboretum. I’ve never been before. It’s a wonderful place - a huge park divided into continents for its collection of beautiful exotic and local trees. This is the lovely Cedar of Lebanon (celebrated on that nation’s flag). It looks like it’ll be a great place for lazing around reading and picnicking in summer. I was actually surprised how few people were there on a sunny day in winter. Wonderful birds too. We saw four African Hoopoes pottering about on the grass - a lovely, iconic bird that I don’t think I’ve ever seen this close to Cape Town before.

The date palm at the confluence stands on a tiny island. About the only thing on that bank spared destruction by the diggers and dozers. A good thing too as the willow beneath the palm seems to be a nesting site for Night Herons. Hopefully the cranes will be hauled away as they begin to rust.

Dawn light on the confluence of the Liesbeek and Black Rivers where we do our bird count. Egyptian Geese fly by. The cranes behind the little undamaged island stand silent, hopefully haemorrhaging money into bankruptcy for a company that sought to wreck the place with the collusion of the city that ignored its own environmental impact assessment which declared that it was wholly inappropriate to build on this environmentally sensitive floodplain. ...

This ruined cottage was an irresistible moonlight attraction when we were teenagers. And the wall was a seat where we could climb up and pretend we were vampires.

The pines have their own charms though. When you’re raised on European culture and JRR Tolkien - and our spectacular African scenery is just the backdrop to life - it was easy to romanticise this slightly exotic landscape. But it doesn’t really belong here and as such it lacks the intense diversity of our native biomes. The one upside though is that it provides a living for fungi from Europe which extrude bizarre fruits out of the ground and bark after rains.