Xe1

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 native forests of Table Mountain. Dense and ringing with the calls of forest birds - unlike the bare alien pine forests that still linger on some slopes.

My camera battery charger has been rediscovered. So I took it for a long walk in the woods on the mountainside this morning. It’s really striking how many more birds you hear when you leave the alien pines and enter the indigenous forest. Now that I recognise the eerie, jaunty call of the Sombre Bulbul, I can hear that the forest is lousy with them. I also spotted a Cape Batis.

I’ll take a ‘plain top’ Les Paul over a veneer top any day. The mystery of maple’s fungal growth patterns is that it changes depending on the angle of the light and how you look at it. Every slab of wood is completely unique. In just the right light, the faintest hint of flames becomes visible on the top of my 2010 Tokai LS150. And patterns that mean that it’s completely identtifiable - like that odd little curl and the deeper flame near the toggle switch. This is a workhorse rock guitar. It’s been banged up and played hard. But it’s still the best guitar I own against some pretty stiff competition.

So I ran into this in Pinelands in March…

Had to relearn how to take pictures when we went to a heavy metal show last night up the street with @sad_ivan and Tanya. @withoutaleaf and I aren’t really metal people so we dressed as tourists. We bumped into the organiser of this 200 odd people event and she can be seen wearing my fly glasses. Absolute blast. Metal heads are the best people. The band, Abaddon, were cracking. Tight as a drum. Thundering sound. A fine night out.