Home
Blood on the Path
Cycling
Books
Biographies
Humour
Travels
Writing
Journalism
Reading
Short Stories
Leisure
Features
Columns
Diaries
Contact Us
Links
Site Map
Copyright

Popular

Favourite Writings
 
Log In





Lost Password?

Friday, 30 July 2010
Home arrow Diaries arrow Hermanus Diaries arrow Day 13 - 6 June

Day 13 - 6 June

June 6

It is finally clear. These entries will form a "mionthary", not a diary. The fact is that, if I am not very careful, I shall fall into retirement - or have done, because I am experiencing what all retirees tell me about their lives:

"I'm so busy, I can't find enough time in the day," they say with self-satisfaction.

"What do you do?" I ask, mystified.

"Well, it's very hard to say. Nothing specific. Nothing you can describe. But I am busy. Mowing the lawn. Thinking. Doing, ...er things," they all say, with equal astonishment.. . . "But what are you doing, if you're not retired?"

Six months ago I was working from 7.30am to about 7pm daily. Mostly writing and editing and publishing those damn Wings and Feathers books. But also doing consultation, researching and reporting for the oil companies and the Dome Inc. goldmining group. And a bit of Editors Inc, and before that a little for the literacy movement READ, and a little less for the anti-guns movement, and for the saving central Johannesburg movement after consulting for an insurance group in the city.

 

A month ago I was busy researching a proposed novel, and writing the SA Petroleum Industry's Association's annual report (which I still am!). But work has become almost impossible to do in these difficult circumstances. My desk is impeccably clean. My upstairs workroom is lined with bookshelves and tidy furniture. The sun streams in from the east, touching the couch to the right of my L-shaped desk area. I start to write, but a splash beyond the balcony catches my eye. Is it a whale? A dolphin? A seal? Investigation proves it is a diving bird. There are lots of them out there today, wheeling a diving; which brings the fishing boats.

Now it's all quiet. From my desk I can see only one hovering seabird and one white motor launch. It is a sunny winter's day, the sea sparkling blue with dazzling white foam stretching back into deep whale-water in thin streaks and fat, puffy patches. Despite the sparkling seascape and bright sunlight I cannot see the lighhouse or any sign of Danger Point. They have disappeared into an indistinguishable mist on the horizon.

. . . I should be trying to write a novel synopsis now. . . but every time I sit down to type these days, my eye is caught by a heavy movement in the sea beyond the white balustrades. It is another wave, coming to pound the rocks. The winter waves are not as high as some of those that came after llast summers storms - but they come in heavier ranks, wide and powerful, surging over the wave-ledges with a strength never seen in April.

The cliff walk has changed again, of course. Mrs Benningfield, the constant early morning -. walker who does not bother to greet when we meet, just: "Have you noticed the April Fool blossoms down there?" or "Doesn't the Felecia look magnificent this year?" - said last week: "Are you not walking every day?" I confessed I was "too busy" to be regular now. "You may miss the orange Cliff Lily," she warned. "If you walk only a kilometre that way, past Kraal Rock, you may see the last of them. They're quite rare. I had to go to Cape Town for a few days. When I got back, the Cliff Lilies were gone.

Our Arum Lilies, which sprung up just outside our gate after the rains, were destroyed some time ago. Just as the gardener next door prophesied, the procupines came in the night and dug them all up, making off with the bulbs and scattering the poor dead lilies among my newly planted fynbos. Fortunately, within the gate - bricked to keep crafty porc. at bay - not only lilies are flourishing, but bunches of other bulbs, including local wild watsonias, have burst forth, half a metre high, and should display their flowers soon.

The cliff continues to bear big patches of blue Felicias - in two different forms Arlene discolvered when examining the leaves - but the blossoms are shrivelling, the colours fading. East of us, about 200 paces along the path from our gate, there are now dramatic patches of red and yellow. The blossoms do not line the path, but stand dramatically at eye level and above. You stare up at a dozen candelabra of redhot poker cacti thrusting above the fynbos. The redhot pokers stand against walls of new yellow blossoms on the rhus bushes which are also above eye-level.

Strange how different forms of fynbos thrust their presence before you with their blooms. There is another bush, a kind of bloukappie with olive-green leaves, which lines both sides of the path about three bays to the east, which I have been walking past, unseeing, for months. Suddenly they are in flower, forcing you to stop and stare.

I must get one for my 'already complete' wild garden outside the gate.

 

 
 
< Prev   Next >

   
 
© 2010 Writing Inc.
Site designed and hosted by www.overberginfo.com