Introducing Cumin

In Memoriam

I lost my shadow this week. She cried, was limp when I held her and tried so hard to purr and be normal. But the end came swiftly and we took her home to bury her next to the plum sapling. I have lived for a week in a country of pathetic fallacy. It has rained daily, the wind has howled and I have had a Lear like rage against the illness that took my gorgeous cat so suddenly. I have watched her brother try to make sense of her absence. I have whispered in his ear how much he is loved and that we won’t leave him. I wish he could understand.
Today, I feel as if I am peeking around a door, emerging from a dark room of grief, into another room that I have never been in before, and this room is hazy too. I’m not sure whether to retreat back into the totally dark room or venture into the one which is lighter, but foggier. I have no emotional energy for adventure. Even the “ho hum” of life is an effort. But that ember in my soul that refuses to die, which wants to love again, is being fanned. Today I have no emotional resources to draw on other than a yearning to embrace another lost creature and give it a home. I have whispered in our big boy’s ear “there is a wee friend coming to stay. She will lick your ears, tap your nose and dance in your shadow. Be brave with me boy, be brave and love again.”

Commemorating the definitive.

This afternoon was “play time”. The housework was done and as it was raining rhinos outside, I pulled out a box of stamps I have been meaning to sort for ages.
I’m not a collector, but I occasionally fossick around with geographical areas that interest me, as you learn so much about a country through the stamps it issues.
Today I was struck by how much I enjoy the “definitive” issues of stamps. These are the ones that you buy from the post office, year in, year out, without paying much attention to them. Often the design is uninspiring or hasn’t changed for so long you fail to notice it. But it does the job just as effectively as the pretty or imaginative commemorative stamp.
I sorted a lot of definitives today, and as I handled them, I wondered what kind of letter they had been attached to and what kind of person had purchased them. As most of the stamps were just post WWII, I was certain the majority would have been stuck to real letters written between real people. Oh to have lived in that gracious part of the 20th century when junk mail had yet to be invented.
My smaller pile of stamps was the bold, colourful and imaginative selection designed to commemorate musicians, authors, museums and acts of gallantry. They covered science and space exploration, antiques and precious gems, wildlife and birds, warriors and poets. Each was a statement of what was historically important to remember.
However, I kept being drawn back to the little definitives. They are the stamp equivalent of a sparrow – a plain little bird, and easily overlooked. It is a stamp that goes largely unnoticed, like most of our lives. But those simple moments, the “pass the salt” of daily existence, are the very backdrop that highlights, accentuates and amplifies to high decibels the flashes of spectacular colour, insight, passion, invention and joy. I could not live without those times, but their appreciation exists only because I live most of my days “in the definitive”.

Forever friends

The first visitor I had in my new home, July 2004, swaggered in as if she owned the place, demanded lunch (I had none to offer her), then settled next to our only heating in the house, an oil filled radiator. She has been with us ever since, although only officially owned by us since May 2005.
This evening she is huddled next to that self same radiator and I have been curled on the floor next to her. She is now late middle age, and very sick. The vets are calling in a specialist as she is puzzling them all. Meanwhile I watch my darling girl with big saucer eyes purr heavily to comfort herself. I have made the floor cushion wet, crying by her side. I don't have her company for much longer, I am sure of that. I wish there was someway we could communicate with them to let them know, beyond any certainty, deeper than the deepest purr that we love them and appreciate all that they give to us.

And now, for something completely different

This evening I met an amazing man, via some programme notes on the back of a CD. The CD is by the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble (SAVAE) and their music is taken from era of Jerusalem’s Second Temple.
Abraham Zvi Idelsohn was one of the most remarkable musicologists of the 20th century. At the outbreak of World War One, he published the first volume of what was to become the ten volume “Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies”. This seminal work, covered the Yemenite community of Palestine, and the Jews of Babylon, Persia, Uzbekistan (Bukharian), Oriental Sephardim, Moroccan, German, Eastern European, Hassidic Jewish communities in Palestine and the Diaspora. It took 20 years to complete.
If you have ever danced around a room singing Hava Nagila, you have AZ Idelsohn to thank for it – he collected the song from the Hassidic community.

The German Invasion of NZ

A chance encounter with the plaque on the above photo started a conversation about the German "invasion" of New Zealand at the end of WWII. It transpires that a daring Kapitan Timms, Commander of a German U Boat landed a party of his able seamen off the Hawkes Bay coast in Napier. The submarine had some farm boys amongst its crew, and they nipped ashore to milk a few cows, returning to the sub with the milk. The tale is told by one of our most honoured military commanders, Air Marshall Sir Rochford Hughes, who evidently met with the U Boat's commander in the 1950s when Germany and Britain had become Nato allies.
The U Boat captain told him that they had been close to the Australian coast and were sent to Napier after an intelligence report that a freighter was loading meat there for the war effort.
“Among the crew were several young men brought up on farms in Germany. According to Kapitan Timms, fresh milk was a welcome change, though they complained about doing it all in the dark. I don’t think we were invaded, but it seems we had some milk taken which wasn’t paid for."
“Kapitan Timms was the sort of chap I believed implicitly. His knowledge of the coast and admiration for the country was also impressive.”
The NZ Ministry of Defence has no record of the landing, but there was some record of a German submarine in the Tasman sea at the end of 1944.
“On December 24 of that year the American steamer Robert J. Walker was torpedoed and sunk 200 miles [320 kilometers] south-east of Jervis Bay, NSW.” NZPA.
(Reference http://sites.google.com/a/aotea.org/don-armitage/Home/great-barrier-island-history/geman-submarine-at-great-barrier-island-1945)

Oh show me a home.......

It could be said that certain things in life just don’t go together; yoghurt with shredded leeks, underwater video games, tango lessons on a glacier, octopus pancakes……I’m sure you could add your own ideas.
My day had a random feel about it. First up, croissants and coffee at our favourite French café (so far, so normal). This was followed by 6 hours of philately, about 200,000 stamps to sort ready for a charity to sell in the UK. I’d volunteered to do it and my better half came along as the roving expert.

Feeling somewhat brain dead by 3.30pm, we took off for another coffee at Jua Kali (“hot Sun” in Swahili) and I came home with a wildebeest.

I’ve always had a soft spot for wildebeest and warthogs – they don’t get on the cover of Vogue or get sent fan mail or flowers. But I find them very endearing. I always wanted a pet warthog, but wildebeest were sort of out of the question, especially as I always lived in an apartment in Africa, with not so much as a front lawn!
So, today, when I clapped eyes on Basie, I was smitten and simply had to take him home. I guess I could sum up the day and by saying I was a stampeded.