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Tuesday,
April 3
Easter
crowds are dwindling. The pink and white Cliff Lilies are everywhere,
but the blood-red April Fool lilies have blackened and whithered.
Each dawn begins in silent, still, grey mist which burns off by 9am
to offer another perfect day. We seem to have been inundated with
guests - first the Trails, with Dale and Elaine Bottom, who provided
much fun, much golf, and many exuberant feasts from The Rock
restaurant to The Milkwood, where we bantered with singing old ladies
and Barry Tilney's
terrible twin (who duped us for a while and kissed all the girls by
pretending to be his brother). Also a delicious day at Vergelegen,
where we dined in ideal conditions and wandered among the
300-year-old giant Camphor trees. (How delightful to see them in a
setting so mellowly bucolic, the great ancestors perhaps of camphors
I planted at my first house in Westville in 1953, and of our
70-year-old camphor in the front garden in Parktown North.)
The
day after the Trails departed, came Pat and Rex Gibson for a
different and even more delightful sojourn with more feasting and
drinking, and golf and gamesmanship, culminating in a long
crayfish-galjoen lunch at The Milkwood with Dennis and Penny Gordon.
The
day after the Gibsons left came Anthony, Lisette and Arlenes
five-year-old grand-daughter. They stayed for nearly a week, and
nearly wore us out. Enough!
cried Arlene last night. She was suffering from nervous exhaustion
and could not sleep. Was up at 5.30 am to take the family to Cape
Town airport. Of course we had some good days. One of them wading
in the low-tide rockpools at Franskraal near Danger Point. Groping
for shells and coral branches among the schools of fish took me right
back to my childhood in our
lagoon on the edge of Gordons Bay.
And
yesterday we strolled in the cool autumn sun through the Harold
Porter Nature Reserve on a walk towards Disa Gorge. Then to Stony
Point at Bettys Bay, where we watched the African Penguins surfing
into shore; hopping over the rocks; parading over grassy knolls and
sheltering in their nests. One giant pair we found ignoring the
fenced off protected area, and huddled in the rocks closer to the
throngs of noisy holidaymakers. Bumped into my old school friend of
more than 50-years ago, Roy Hare, who is visiting us tomorrow. His
son-in-law (Simon Barlow, owner of Rustenburg) owns a cottage at
Bettys Bay, so Roy and Rosalie will not be staying with us.)
My
cliff walks have suffered. Not only from the presence of guests, but
from the hordes of holidaymakers who have arrived for Easter
holidays. Nonetheless, I have noticed yet another change in the
fynbos - suddenly drier, but with many yellow flowers of different
species. The 'Skyblue'
Lobelia is flourishing everywhere (except in my rockery where it
tends to lie down).
In
this past fortnight I have gauged out a dozen holes in the
soil-covered rock outside our frontgate and planted several pairs of
proteas, ericas, and locally gathered fynbos plants. My fynbos
garden, on both sides of our seafront stone wall, is now 'complete',
and we only have to watch it grow, altering it to our tastes over the
seasons. We found signs of francolin in the rockery yesterday -
feathers and a cleared space where they had enjoyed a dust bath next
to one of my fragile agathosmas. Today John M ('our'
John Mlilo) watched a mongoose scamper over the wall next to our
seafront gate, walk along the lawn to the West terrace - then come
streaking back and leap over the wall. We don't
know what frightened it. Could it really have been sight of our two
yapping balls of fluff?
Dolphins
looped past our verandah in long lines the other morning, and birds
are active out there om the sea as I gaze out of the window from this
desk. Danger Point lighthouse stands out, white and thin across the
bay. The seas are blue and relatively still. It reminds me of the
last period of high seas when I saw to my astonishment tall towers on
walls of white standing on the horizon to the west of Danger Point.
Binoculars showed that these were pillars of surf, exploding on the
rocks below the lighthouse, and on the reef running far out to sea.
Some of the towers of spray were equal to the height of the
lighthouse. The 'walls of
white' consisted of
broken surf five times the width of the lighthouse.
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