Dear Reader,
Have you missed my relentless communication? Fear not, school opens on Wednesday after a month off, and so I will finally be reunited with my computer, and my sanity.
Here follows my holiday highlights:
My daughter has informed me she doesn’t like R 79 Woolies raspberries. So I reverted to my number one parenting strategy of flinging packets of mini Marie biscuits onto the lawn for all snack times.
Kingsley won’t eat my roast potatoes but will eat an apple rotting at its core and drink the (probably poisonous) liquid seeping out of a cheap plastic toy where you propel rings onto sticks (is there a name for this?).
My children have taken to drinking their morning tea with a syringe, so I constantly feel like I’m in an absurdist play.
They found the spikey head of a pineapple on the floor of the green grocer’s and kept it as their pet. See point above about absurdist play.
Kingsley might turn out to be a martyr for his religion. I discovered him playing in the garden, he had found two large sticks from the veggie patch, tied them together into a cross and then tied himself to it. I hesitantly asked what he was doing, and he cheerfully said, ‘look, I’m like Jesus’. See point above about absurdist play.
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My kids can’t ride bikes. My goal for the holiday was to get them riding (never mind I learnt at 11 years old and Rachel at about 25. What can I say, we were ‘indoor plants’ according to my mom, but we learnt to read and feed ourselves so can everyone stop making bike-riding seem like such an important development goal).
As a wise friend said to me, the easiest way to ruin the holiday is to set yourself a goal, like ‘get kids to ride bikes’. Favouring masochism, I ignored her advice, and we bought them bikes. Pippa took to it instantly and is now fanatical, Kingsley, the opposite; tears, moaning, limited co-ordination, lots of blaming the bike.
After watching this drama unfold all holiday, and remembering some writing advice from Margaret Atwood for writing characters from star signs, but not having the space to write anything of my own, I illogically combined the two and looked up the kids’ star signs, something I have never done. They were scarily accurate, particularly in relation to the bikes.
My Scorpio is “adventurous and always on the lookout for new experiences. They seem to be constantly in motion, involved in new challenges. They live life on their terms. They don't mind making mistakes as long as they learn from them”. My Cancer on the other hand is a cautious being. “There is something almost preternaturally sensitive about Cancers. They are ruled by emotion and refuse to give up their idealism even in the face of facts and realism. Yet they are more determined than their nature makes them seem. They have a great reservoir of faith and strength”.[1]
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While on holiday in the Berg my general mood plummeted because I felt like our country was falling apart. I watched my husband unable to relax while he worried over the multiple safety nets private individuals must put in place for their businesses and homes to function properly.
Tim Cohen wrote in his Freedom Day After the Bell column that a friend of his mentioned a quote which stuck with him. The 20th century Viennese writer Karl Kraus wrote: “The situation in Berlin is serious but not hopeless. The situation in Vienna is hopeless but not serious”. And what are we?
Despite Warwick’s never-ending stress, later that day I found him putting cable ties on the communal tennis net. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ‘we all need to be part of the solution’. His humour and pathological optimism only slightly helped my morbid outlook.
In Mike Nicol’s substack this week he quotes Christopher Hope’s words, that we are “suffering from a damaged sense of place”. And this rang true for me. Mike has written about “the uneasy suburban gardens with empty wine glasses beside the swimming pools”, and this is how living feels for me. We are in a glass castle, a lavish and fragile life.
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As ever though, children are what rescue you from solipsism, if not for their delightful selves, then for the immediate practicality they demand.
For instance, on our drive to the Berg one of them had a runny tummy, we got to a loo in time, but not quite onto the loo in time, and so we had some spillage on the leg, which I had to wipe with toilet paper and water. Immediately hereafter my daughter told me she does not want the cheese on her burger, so (having washed!) the hand that just attended to the bathroom disaster, it then peeled the synthetic cheese off her burger. On getting home my same hands were washing lettuce and I just thought, the things these hands do in a day.
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Notwithstanding bad moods, and the odd scrap, the lingering feeling of the holiday is of sitting with friends and family in the autumn sun in an abundance of beautiful places that make up our life. As per the title of that really excellent film that won all the awards this year, life is ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’.
[1] https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/horoscopes-and-astrology-channel.htm
Have you seen the movie by the same title?