Long Time No See!

Interesting that this is a direct translation, or calque, of a Chinese expression 好耐冇見 (hou2 noi6 mou5 gin3)! Anyway, I digress before I’ve even started!?!!

This is my first post in three weeks! I had intended to post weekly, from 1st April when we moved, but I had seriously underestimated the tasks ahead.

The move was hectic, to put it mildly! The contents of a 40ft container which we’d left here, plus a 20ft container from Hong Kong had to be sorted and homed, and it took us two weeks of hard slog before the house looked like a house, and another week of tweaking and sorting to get (almost) everything in place.

According to the internet, one of the five most stressful events in life is moving house. So, of course we decided to add to that stress by fasting throughout our move! Kurt lost his mum at the beginning of 2023, and we thought it would be a nice tribute to do Ramadan in memory of her - she was a practicing Muslim and an absolutely lovely lady, very much missed. All started well, before the move, and we actually enjoyed the discipline, and felt very self-satisfied that we were losing some of the weight we had gained whilst couch surfing and living out of suitcases. But once we were into the move, things changed somewhat. If you’ve seen the film ‘Airplane’, you’ll remember the line ‘Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking/ drinking/…/sniffing glue’. It was definitely the wrong week(s) to quit eating!! By day four, I think the only reason we weren’t divorced was that neither of us had the energy to phone a lawyer. We were both tired and hangry.

The first day, we unpacked the big container which had been loaded up after Kurt had rushed to Hong Kong at the start of Covid and also the smaller one we had sent from Hong Kong. I had been worried that my books would have rotted and crumbled, but was pleasantly surprised at how well they had been packed and how fine they were after five years of neglect. There were no casualties, and I spent a pleasant morning in week three organizing them onto the bookcase. We had hired movers for the small container, and Joseph, who has been with Kurt for years, and who had stayed on the property while we were away to keep an eye on it, found a gang of workers to do the unloading of the big one. Both groups of workers were superb, working like absolute troopers. It was actually funny; they all started off bouncy, jovial and chatty and as the morning wore on, got quieter and quieter. By late afternoon they were more or less on their knees, but they got the job done, and somehow Joseph’s guys had the energy to come back and do a couple more days of moving and shifting and heavy lifting. I dread to think how long it would have taken us to get sorted if we hadn’t had them here.

We spent the time trying to find ‘places’ for ‘things’, and by day three had had our first row because ‘obviously’ things were being put in the wrong places! This was actually a good thing, because it meant we were both left in peace to unpack in our own particular style, so much more got done while we weren’t talking to each other! A more-positive experience on day four was early morning; it had rained throughout the night before, and when I opened the kitchen door first thing, the rain had brought out the scent of the spearmint, lavender and rosemary growing in the herb garden. THIS was what we came back here for – that first breath of clean, heavenly-scented air!

By the end of the first week, we had all our belongings in the house and our energy levels were going down, so despite there being less to do, we took another week to do it! It was just a slog; emptying the never-ending boxes, deciding where to put things, finding that the place we had found wasn’t big enough/ was too high up/ too low down/ was just the wrong place, and then re-evaluating whether we actually need this thing at all. But now, finally, at week three, we’re almost there. Pictures and mirrors have been hung, and floors and door handles polished. Now, all that’s left is to sort our insanely huge collection of shoes, half of which are mouldy (which should make sorting easier). Living across and between continents, and having had to abandon everything in South Africa because of Covid has resulted in quite a bit of duplication, and not just of shoes; we’ve found that we have two washing machines and more cutlery, towels and bedding than a hotel.

While we were away, Joseph was given a job by one of the tenants who rented the house, working at installing security cameras and fences and the like. Unsurprisingly he has already been promoted and so is pretty busy, but despite this, he still does some work for us on his days off. When we came back to the house, the garden was pretty overgrown and neglected, but after the boxes had been unloaded, Joseph spent three days clipping and tidying and pruning and the place is back to even better than it was before we left. Mercy, his wife, works inside the house and has the same thoroughness and capability as him. The house is gleaming, already.

Yesterday was the first day we really got into the garden. I took charge of the swimming pool when we moved in, and am learning about chlorine and sweeping and weirs (the hole where the water flows) and creepy-crawlies (which are not little insects, and were, in fact invented by a South African to make cleaning the pool easier). Kurt has taken charge of the pond. When we lived here last time, the pond was home to one huge, old fish and was a self-regulating eco-system with plants and frogs and insects, so we never needed to clean it or feed the fish.

Unfortunately our last tenants decided that this system wasn’t what they wanted, so they decided to totally clean out the pond, fit filters, remove the lovely lilies and add their own plants, all of which resulted in the demise of our trusty old guy and a pond which now, apparently, needs daily attention. They added their own Koi, which got eaten by birds, twice, and then ended up putting a net over to protect the latest batch of six, which is what we have now inherited.

I’m now on a mission to research how to get the pond back to self-sufficiency (advice welcome), and in the meantime, Kurt is tending the fish and the pumps and the plants. So yesterday, we spent a brilliant morning pulling out and moving some of the ‘greenery’ and algae and cleaning filters. It felt good to be working out in the fresh air and the pond is looking much better already (though we say so ourselves!).

Which brings us up to date. All being well, from next week, normal life should resume. We can come up for air and think what we’re going to ‘do’ here for a living, and what we’re going to do with the house and garden. I’m still getting my head round the fact that it’s April and we’re heading into winter, and I need to find the South African equivalent of Gardener’s World!