An English country garden? I don't think so....

We have all sorts of wonderful wildlife living in our street, from a cantankerous porcupine to a pair of dikkops (I beg your pardon, Thick Knees) striped mice, wattled plovers and, as of October last year, gray hornbills.
One evening whilst daydreaming at the kitchen window I glimpsed an owl gliding silently down the road and landing in the dead tree I have refused to cut down.
In the garden, fighter bats perform breathtaking aerobatic displays at dusk as we sit under the thatch of the boma on the lawn near the swimming pool. Small frogs with alarmingly deep voices and who view this spot as their own graciously update us on their progress as they clear the bugs, flies and mozzies so that we can take a glass or two in peace. Skittish ghekos eye us warily, little pulses throbbing in their throats as they cling to the walls.
This is why I have allowed the wild grasses to grow at the bottom of the street. We are the last house in the cul-de-sac and the landscape maintenance of the patch outside falls to us.
I am deeply proud of the landscape choice I have made; a little haven to counter the tweezer-lipped edgings, the painfully pruned, snipped, fertilized and sprayed sterile pavements that abound in suburbia. I shall defend it with all my resources. Landscape committee take note

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Tomatoes, chillies, basil, flat-leaf parsley and um?

Chinese cabbage? Not sure.....

Of words and sounds and fragrant African dust

It's a glorious day in Johannesburg and I wake with the words of John Gillespie Magee Jnr's poem High Flight running through my head...

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

— John Gillespie Magee, Jr

I am instantly six years old and excited-breathless in the Cessna with my mother at the Lusaka Flying Club. She has brought a cushion for me, an improvised booster-seat, so that I can see everything just as she does. She calls me the co-pilot, and teaches me the pre-flight checks while my friends are learning nursery rhymes and being coaxed into stiff-petticoated Saturday afternoon party dresses...

Or the bush-smell of the first rains after long dry winters; the warm comfort of the scent and a sense that everything will be alright again, now that the rains are finally here. Lying on our backs in the yard as fat drops kick up dust around us and the dogs run barkingly in circles, giddy with excitement.

Or the cry of a fish eagle in the early evening.

Love the light in the mornings

On the subject of walking I should perhaps apologise to the residents who live along our walking route. My grandmother and I are prone to spirited debate. Sometimes it gets quite loud....and I'm not sure that the sound of 2 cackling old bats is the wake up sound of choice.

Pause for a moment

My grandmother and I walk through a quiet leafy suburb of Johannesburg each morning just after sunrise. This memorial catches my heart every day. Sometimes I see the people who loved him sitting quietly, remembering him and trying to understand how this could happen. There are always fresh flowers, and keepsakes and notes.
I didn't know him, I don't know his family, but my heart goes out to them every morning when we walk past this fragile testament. 
The simple words on the side of the road where he died in his car. He will always be remembered.

And in a country where we lose so many to road carnage every day this one small monument to a life cut short should make us all pause for a moment to say "Enough".