FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE

When Florence our housekeeeper puts a pair of socks into the washing machine, what we get back is two matching socks. Mathematically, this makes perfect sense.

This is not the case with me. When Florence isn’t around – especially when she takes a holiday – what the machine spits out is a big fat pile of lonely socks.

(Love the poster, which I saw at Toffiefest 2012. No name designer? Sorry, there were no credits on site.)

I don’t know how it happens, but it does. Almost every pair of socks that I put in the machine gets divorced in the wash. When F gets back from her holiday, she manages to reconcile every pair. Where do all those divorcees go, for heaven’s sake?

Florence is the original domestic goddess. She regularly saves me from drowning – in ironing, messy cupboards and general domestic detritus. Stuff I never can get to in a day.

She also makes neat piles of things. Like this. Incredibly soothing on the eye of a neat freak.

My all time favourite, though, is ironed sheets. Unlike me, Florence really loves ironing. I mean loves.  This is perfect symbiosis. Because  I really love having ironed things. Nothing beats pulling a freshly ironed lavender scented sheet up to your nose on a cold night when your day has been brutal and tiring. Moments before I slip into my 8 hour coma, as my head sinks deeper and heavier into the duck feathers, the  last person whose face I see before a fall asleep is Florence’s. Nkosi Ntombizanele.

PLACES TO GO, THINGS TO PAINT

Paint Brush is one of 300 colours by Midas Envirolite, Zero VOC paint.

I like collecting paint brushes. And I love having projects lined up so I can do things with them.

It looks like I might soon be in a new house (big yay!) which will usher in a whole new world of joy for my brush collection.

I’m desperate to try a colour clash wall, like the installations by the artist Odili Donald Odita. Not to copy him, but to do something that is clashy and interesting and completely un-square.  I love this example, from his website.

– by Odili Donald Odita

 

HEMELHUIS WALLPAPER

When I was little, we were often taken on holiday to visit our granny who lived in Cradock in the Karoo, in a house with a sign on the gate that said Carrington Lodge. It was lovely to sit on Granny’s lap. But if you weren’t on her lap, Carrington Lodge felt a little bit creaky and a lot spooky, for some reason. Maybe it was just that I was very small.

Out in the yard there was a row of cold unventilated garages which once were used to park carriages. Inside one of these, there were even remnants of an almost working carriage that nobody wanted to get rid of. Then, in the garden, there was the chicken run. From time to time, there’d be a ritual killing of chickens for supper. After the chicken was beheaded by Granny’s gardener, we’d watch, stunned, while it ran around till it dropped into the petunias. Running around like a chicken without a head. Isn’t that how the saying goes? All completely normal.

It was always wintertime in Cradock. I remember it being cold much more than it being hot. In wintertime in Cradock it was hard to get out of bed in the middle of the night. If you had to get out of bed for a pee, you had to walk down a passage past Granny’s room, over ice cold slippery old mosaic tiles, under the gaze of a stuffed kudu staring you out from above an archway with a velvet curtain. I was scared of the kudu, and I thought something would jump out from behind the velvet and give me a big skrik.

So I never did go down that passage until after sunrise. I always stayed in my room.

Granny believed in potties.

I wish Granny had had a friend like Jacques Erasmus from Hemelhuis Restaurant in Cape Town. Jacques might have encouraged her to do a friendly thing around the kudu trophy. It would have been so much easier to go down that passage if there had been tear-outs of Barbara Barnard from Fair Lady, and some unwanted sheet music, and the comic pages from Farmers Weekly or a Prince Valiant annual. Maybe a poster of Four Jacks and  a Jill, or something.

I love how Jacques recently put up wallpaper around his friendly reindeer who presides over lunch at Hemelhuis.

I like walls that earn their keep. Have a look at the ‘plumbers’ wall’ done in Fresco here, or the plants-behaving-like animals trophy wall here. And the wall made not of bricks, but of ferns, here.

Walls don’t have to be plain. Or boring. Or scary.

Grandmother’s Room – from the Earthcote Heritage Collection.

THE OXYGEN THIEVES: UNDER THE SKY

I love how these teen bandits just went right ahead and did what they said they were gonna do ie. composed and produced a foot-tapping tune, then headed down to the beach near the train tracks in St James, to shoot it. It’s cool what you can do when you’re 16, and you have a voice, friends, a camera and school holidays to kick up the dust.

In the band: Jed da Silva, Michael de la Hunt, Troy Korevaar, Ryan de Kwaadsteniet

The film was shot & edited by Jack Mason

St James White is from the Earthcote Heritage Collection

OH BE QUIET PLEASE.

‘Stillness’ – one of 300 colours by Midas Envirolite – ZERO VOC eco paint

Two things. If you want to take a photograph of something boring but potentially stunning – like a candle, for instance – you need Instagram. From tomorrow, I’m Instagramming. I’ve tried a few things already. My palms are sweating.

Second thing. I’ve come to the conclusion that lighting a candle at the end of the day, especially in winter, is a very nice thing to do. Essential, almost. Sorry if this sounds flaky, but it’s true. A flickering candle makes everything calm and pretty. People talk softer and behave better. If you want to take the softness thing a step further, flick the mains switch on your electricity board. Bring on the candles and make like the outtage is with you for the night. Bloody Eskom. The stillness that issues forth from dead computers, phones, televisions and Wii’s, is like a kind of music. The mains switch is a powerful trick.

STEFAN WAS HERE AGAIN

Tonight Stefan the flex sculpture man brought this beauty around. I beamed the picture up and it was taken in 45 seconds. Go Stefan.

 

 

BUY THE RHINO. HELP SAVE STEFAN.

Angel in flex, by Stefan Schoeman

OK, you’ll need to scroll down for the rhino. I got this one, the zombie angel.

An artist by the name of Stefan works between Kalk Bay and Woodstock, selling his flex sculptures of angels, rhinos, buffalos and things. I had to buy the zombie angel. Not just because Stefan needs the cash (he told me cash is in very short supply, his side) but because I think Stefan’s sculptures are something else. I think he’d do well if he did something like this on a grand scale. Anyone with a garden gazebo, room divider or chandelier in need of a reshape?

Zombie angel is now on my dishrack. It can stay there until I have to wash up after Sunday lunch. Maybe lunch will be more of a success with this presiding over the cook-off.

Stefan doesn’t have a phone, isnt on Twitter or Facebook, and isn’t sure of his fixed address. If you see a guy wearing a skintight bandana on his head selling flex sculptures, just buy something. Or place your order here, and I’ll tell him next time he comes by. It’s all lovely.

More by Stefan:

THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

So I’m driving on the highway in Cape Town, near Constantia, and I stop at some traffic lights.

In my rear view mirror I notice something flipping around on the road. At first, I think it’s just a leaf or something, blowing in the wind.

Then – because it’s moving along at a pace – I look properly.

That thing is not a leaf. Not a leaf at all but a large creepy crawly, at least as big as my hand.

It is a crab.

I don’t know if it’s a river crab or a sea crab or a marsh crab, but this place is nowhere near anything like a river or the sea or a vlei.

This is a very lost crab, a very long way from home. I hope it didn’t become another road statistic.

Un-freakin’-real.

‘Kreepy Krawly’ from the Earthcote Heritage Collection – 70 colours inspired by South African people, places and things

KAROO MAN

PHOTO: JACK MASON

PHOTO: JACK MASON

PHOTO: JACK MASON

PHOTO: JACK MASON

I wonder what Guy Butler would have said about this Karoo jol? If Guy were 20 in 2012, would he have chucked a tent and a sleeping bag into his bakkie and hotfooted it to AfrikaBurn, or would he rather have spent the weekend warming his swivel chair, scribbling poetry and watching thorn trees grow?

Guy Butler’s autobiography

Karoo Morning is another kind of Karoo experience. A real life one; the story of Guy Butler’s childhood. It’s an old book, but whenever I want to read something beautiful and simple, with words that feel like they’re knitted together with wisdom and wit and emotion, I whip this off my shelf. From a time and a place that was as brutal as it was gentle.

Guy Butler and my father’s family came from the same farming clan near Cradock in the Eastern Cape. It’s cool and interesting reading about people whose names I’ve heard my father mention so many times over suppers, they became like diningroom wallpaper.

How Guy Butler writes is beautiful. Especially his endings. Like the last few lines of this chapter.

And this ending:

I am crying from the depths of my being; I am sitting on a train and it is jerking into movement; a lady I hardly know with a lovely face is sitting opposite me, smiling and speaking kind words, but to no avail. Then she stops speaking, purses her lips, and does what no woman has ever done before: she whistles like a bird. I stop crying. My new Aunt Hilda had no further difficulties with me on the long train journey to Louisvale.

From the Paint&Place Zero VOC paint collection.

YOU ARE S U C H A CARD

I love all the time and crazy mad sense of fun that went into this. With love from BallpointBoy to me.