Love+rambles

I’M staring at a pack of environmentally friendly pencils, gleaming bright green in the lamplight. I’m thinking of their practicality, their old-time value and how best they can be displayed in my new digs for my four-day weekly stints in Johannesburg. My mind is rambling, I have so much to say but I can’t seem to streamline my thoughts. My thoughts right now, read as follows: a huge important meeting tomorrow (urgh), organising my new digs in Big Smoke, painting that bathroom on the farm and getting the smaller camps set up (a few smaller camps, I have found, are always useful), autumn and winter to come, grass, cooking, minor success with our Friday night show despite the embarrassing photo shopped press pictures - it occurs to me, I have first-world problems today.

Here goes the blog, pardon the mess…

My three days on the farm expire way too quickly – can’t wait for a repeat visit Saturday. I absolutely love cooking in winter and for two reasons: 1) I get to cook hearty home stews, pies and other lovely winter meals 2) standing close to the wood-burning stove is the warmest, most comforting place in the whole of our rickety old farmhouse. This Saturday, I’ll be cooking a stew of oxtail in red wine served with couscous. I still have that cake to bake! Farm time spells simplicity and love winning, even after a trying week. On the farm there are no colleagues nagging for a take-out, if you want to eat you’ll cook it, on a fire that you’ll have to build yourself. 

Ancient, useful.

 Autumn is in full swing, and we tend to have colder weather there than in the city. It was fantastic to snuggle up at night and feel the crisp bite of winter in the mornings and evenings. Winter on the farm can be a marvellous time – if you can get over the fact that we are chronically skint from having to buy bales of grass. We found a good source of teff – a preferred hay type here. It is fine grass, very nourishing and quite expensive. We’ll be trying to acquire as much as we can in the next week or two.

The logistics of getting anything onto the farm is a nightmare, never mind bulky bales of grass. The closest big town is 60kms away. Couple that with the fact that it is hard going over the farm road and looming winter becomes a nightmare. We’ll manage something, we always do.

On Sunday evening, the wind blew frigid and the temperature gauge in my car read 10.5 degrees Celsius. Of course, on a night like that our ponies will break out of their camp for a quick wander about the property (the huge 1200 hectare stretch of farm). We caught most of them, and seeing as they’ve no way off the property, we left the remaining four out wandering for the night.  We had to, the cosmos flowers are shoulder high and the night was pitch black. On Monday morning they were lined up at the gate waiting for breakfast. Love wins.

My accommodations over in Big Smoke are improving as I’ve mentioned: my own little flatlet with my own little patch of garden. Bliss. I go a bit soft in the head if I can’t feel grass under my feet and if I’ve no privacy. This is such good news.

We’ll be painting the bathroom on the farm – we are painting it ‘putting green’ simply because that is the paint we have lying around. The bathroom is creepy, so we don’t think the green will do much to make it much creepier. So we will paint. I should add that we’ve threatened to paint for the last two years… Let’s see how far we get.

Love the space you’re in, you’ll never regret it.