Only in South Africa

I got an alarming little email today from our Durban office..about a nasty interloper in the lavie. Picture the scene. The story goes that one fairly nerdy policeman (he is an IT specialist with the police) named Sandile Msibi, went to the loo for his morning constitutional.  Lucky for him the loo lid was closed because as he opened it to pop his bottom on the seat, a bloody great snake said how's your father from inside the bowl.

Now the warning in this email, and I quote verbatim, says "it's not strange that snakes swim along the sewer lines and end up in the toilet bowl. It's by God's grace that his toilet pan was closed, otherwise God knows what would have befallen to them. And as he lifted the pan, he saw the snake and closed it right back (unlike those of us who enter the toilet backwards, taking it for granted the course is clear!!!)."

Now what is hilarious is this intrepid policeman then bellowed for help which came of course because he was in the police station...and the hapless snake was killed right there in the loo cubicle, so says the warning.

The email came with picture evidence of this sneaky snake which I just had to look at and realised that we South Africans do things properly. A job done by us is a job very well done. And clearly we don't like snakes. 

In my minds eye I can see the chaos that ensued when help arrived too. Uniformed officers racing round trying to find the appropriate tool for the job of eradicating the snake...without getting bitten. And a proper job was done.

Yes, same lavie, now minus the snake. Actually minus the lavie too. I love the four pound metal hammer and a coat hanger used for the job. And I can see the guys all with mental images of a snake attached to their privates smashing the lav repeatedly till the snake was well and truly done in.

All I can think is it was lucky Sandile Msibi was in close proximity to lav paper because I for one would have needed it instantaneously had this happened to me.

The email ends with this sage advice,
"Beware!!! Always make sure the pan is closed when you go to bed lest wild life gets into your bedrooms, always switch the light on when going into the loo, and lastly but not the least make sure there is nothing in the bowl before you use the toilet.". 

You have been duly cautioned.

Injurious Behaviour

I had more than a little giggle this morning at the mishap of a friend of a friend during her bathtime. It got me thinking that girl mishaps are so funny. Men can take the biscuit too but for some reason women manage to do things properly with just the right amount of embarrassment to make it hilarious and legendary. 

Roxanne got into her bath; and one can only assume she had locked out all small people demanding and fussing, forgetting that her last foray into the bathroom had been to dress a banged up knee and the bottle of gentian violet was still on the edge of the bath. Unnoticed, this bottle dropped into the bath and dyed Roxanne from head to toe, a delicious shade of blue.  It takes a good four to five days for gentian violet to wash off. And Roxanne is now Smurfette.

I have legendary cooking mishaps. On one particularly off night, I produced home made pasta with a flourish for one of my directors who had graced us with his presence. The pasta I was so proud of was so stodgy it came out of the bowl in one great lump on the end of the serving spoon. So we sliced it like polenta and tried to be polite. But the funniest story I ever heard was my mother's friend, Marialena , who was running late for a very posh do and got herself in a twist quite literally.

Marialena is a drop dead gorgeous Greek goddess, tall, olive skinned, svelte and with a mop of to die for hair that is her crowning glory. And she is pretty. And clever. So picture the scene. She decides after she has dressed in her evening frock, complete with stockings and killer stiletto heels, that she needs to fix her nails, one of which has broken.

Not an issue. She stands in the bathroom and prepares to stick a false nail over her broken nail and here comes the rub. She opens the nail glue and sets the false nail on the edge of the basin. Then she pops a drop of the nail glue on the nail and picks the nail up. She now has the glue bottle, lidless, in her one hand and the glued false nail in the other. So she holds the glued nail in her lips while she shuts the glue bottle and puts it down, only to discover she has now glued the nail to her own lips, and her lips shut. The chaos that ensued involved her ever loving husband Mike, falling about laughing, some small amount of blood, paint thinners and a couple of stitches. The stitches were in Mikes head where her stiletto connected with him when he suggested leaving her lips like that.  That's doing it properly.

Which reminds me of the funniest story I ever read and I copy it here in totality because it is too good to precis.  There are loads of stories closer to home of a similar ilk but I have to beg permission from the ladies in question before I dare publish a word...

All hair removal methods have tricked women with their promises of easy, painless removal - The epilady, scissors, razors, Nair and now...the wax. My night began as any other normal weeknight. Come home, fix dinner, play with the kids. I then had the thought that would ring painfully in my mind for the next few hours: "Maybe I should pull the waxing kit out of the medicine cabinet." So I headed to the site of my demise: the bathroom. 

It was one of those "cold wax" kits. No melting a clump of hot wax, you just rub the strips together in your hand, they get warm and you peel them apart and press them to your leg (or wherever else) and you pull the hair right off. No muss, no fuss. How hard can it be? I'm not a genius, but I am mechanically inclined enough to figure this out. (YA THINK!?!) 

So I pull one of the thin strips out. Its two strips facing each other stuck together. Instead of rubbing them together, my genius kicks in so I get out the hair dryer and heat it to 1000 degrees. ("Cold wax," yeah...right!) I lay the strip across my thigh. Hold the skin around it tight and pull. It works! OK, so it wasn't the best feeling, but it wasn't too bad. I can do this! Hair removal no longer eludes me! I am She-rah, fighter of all wayward body hair and maker of smoother skin extraordinaire. 

With my next wax strip I move north. After checking on the kids, I sneak back into the bathroom, for the ultimate hair fighting championship. I drop my panties and place one foot on the toilet. Using the same procedure, I apply the one strip across the right side of my bikini line, covering the right half of my *hoo-hoo* and stretching down the inside of my butt cheek (Yes, it was a long strop) I inhale deeply and brace myself...RRRIIIPPP!!!! 

I'm blind!!! Blinded from pain!!!!...OH MY GOD!!!!!!! Vision returning, I notice that I've only managed to pull off half the strip. CRAP!!! Another deep breath and RRIIPP!! Everything is swirly and spotted. I think I may pass out...must stay conscious...Do I hear crashing drums??? Breathe, breathe...OK, back to normal. 

I want to see my trophy - a wax covered strip, the one that has caused me so much pain, with my hairy pelt sticking to it. I want to revel in the glory that is my triumph over body hair. I hold up the strip! there's no hair on it. Where is the hair??? WHERE IS THE WAX??? 

Slowly I ease my head down, foot still perched on the toilet. I see the hair. The hair that should be on the strip. I touch. I am touching wax. CRAP! I run my fingers over the most sensitive part of my body, which is now covered in cold wax and matted hair. Then I make the next BIG mistake...remember my foot is still propped up on the toilet? I know I need to do something. So I put my foot down. 

DANG!!!! I hear the slamming of a cell door. 

*Hoo-Hoo*?? sealed shut! 

Butt?? Sealed shut! 

I penguin walk around the bathroom trying to figure out what to do and think to myself "Please don't let me get the urge to poop. My head may pop off! What can I do to melt the wax? Hot water!! Hot water melts wax!!! I'll run the hottest water I can stand into the bathtub, get in, immerse the wax-covered bits and the wax should melt and I can gently wipe it off, right??? WRONG!!!! 

I get in the tub - the water is slightly hotter than that used to sterilize surgical equipment - I sit. Now, the only thing worse than having your inner regions glued together is having them glued together and then glued to the bottom of the tub...in scalding hot water. Which, by the way, doesn't melt cold wax. So, now I'm stuck to the bottom of the tub as though I had cement-epoxied myself to the porcelain!!! 

God bless the man who had convinced me a few months ago to have a phone put in the bathroom!!! I call my friend, thinking surely she has waxed before and has some secret of how to get me undone. It's a very good conversation starter - "So my butt and hoo-hoo are glued together to the bottom of the tub!" There is a slight pause. She doesn't know any secret tricks for removal but she does try to hide her laughter from me. She wants to know exactly where the wax is located, "Are we talking cheeks of hoo-hoo?" She's laughing out loud by now...I can hear her. I give her the rundown and she suggests I call the number on the side of the box. YEAH!!!! RIGHT!!! 

While we go through various solutions. I resort to scraping the wax off with a razor. Nothing feels better than to have your girlie goodies covered in hot wax, glued shut, stuck to the tub in super hot water and then dry-shaving the sticky wax off!! By now the brain is not working, dignity has taken a major hike and I'm pretty sure I'm going to need Post-Traumatic Stress counselling for this event. 

My friend is still talking with me when I finally see my saving grace...the lotion they give you to remove the excess wax. What do I really have to lose at this point? I rub some on and OH MY GOD!!!!!! 

The scream probably woke the kids and scared the dickens out of my friend. Its' sooo painful, but I really don't care. IT WORKS!!!! It works!!! I get a hearty congratulation from my friend and she hangs up. I successfully remove the remainder of the wax and then notice to my grief and despair... THE HAIR IS STILL THERE......ALL OF IT!!!!!!!!! 

So I recklessly shave it off. Heck, I'm numb by now. Nothing hurts. I could have amputated my own leg at this point. Next week I'm going to try hair color.....

Screaming with laughter here. I want to be friends with this anonymous American woman. She will get on with all my other girlfriends. Have a happy weekend.

It Takes Two

My dear friend JP invited me onto a beta site of a great new social networking thingamy called turntable.fm this last week and my whole life has been flipped on its pip. I have been known to be a bit of a music junkie but this site has made my addiction a total obsession. You get to DJ people, with other people, real people, and chat and share new music. It's better than karaoke and anyone who knows me knows how hard it is to get the microphone off me when that whole things a going on. Best of all, the Monica Geller in me is totally enthralled. You get voted on for your music. So you get points as a DJ and the more points you get, the cuter, funkier, more intimidating you can make your avatar.

So in my short lifespan on the site I have accumulated 186 DJ points and strut my stuff as Mammacass which I find quite hilarious. The site works on the same principle as chat rooms so you get to choose who you hang out with which can be bloody intimidating - especially since it is a beta test site at the moment and full to overflowing with very very clever IT developer types, including the very boffins who write all the code for Twitter, Facebook, Google and so on - and they all have kicking music collections.

I have consequently found myself sticking to what I know. "Retired Hippies" draws my attention on a regular basis which is strictly late 60's and 70's music and yes, they do get tense if you get the dates wrong! "Cmon in" is fabulous for anything goes and there is a very sociable gang of regulars who hang out there but my absolute favourite is the "80's Fun Music" room where I have unpacked my entire repertoire and am still not bored.

Sadly like all things internetty, I don't think the site will be free for much longer and I can see the day soon  when we have to buy credits and become paying customers. I mean hell, someone has to pay for the development and what a fine concept it is. I think it will be worth every cent.

To join the beta test, you need an invite from a Facebook friend already on the site. So go to turntable.fm and  click the Facebook login. The doors are shut from time to time but keep trying - it's worth the visit. Oh and it only works on Google Chrome so you will have to download and install that first.

I am rattling the windows right this minute to Bruce Hornsby & the Range..That's just the way it is. See you on the flipside.

Weighty Issues

My friend Frances posted a quote on her Facebook status this afternoon ‎"Dairy products are the single, most relevant cancer promoter." : Kathy Freston, author of Quantum Wellness and I couldn't possibly disagree more. Look I am sure she has done loads of research - Kathy, not Frances - and I am certain that there is merit in her statement but if all we did was eliminate everything that promoted cancer, we would be living on, well, fresh air, and with global warming, carbon emissions and so on, there is precious little of that around either. Frances lives in Reykjavík, Iceland; she gets to chew on volcanic ash in her fresh air, which I am sure has bugger all nutritional value.

Of course I make this statement boldly because my weight has become a bit of an issue since Christmas where I seem to have found every pound, kilo and ounce that anyone within a 100km radius of me has lost. So what I swallow has significant significance. Fresh air is becoming a serious contender if I ever want to fit into any of my jeans ever again. I have consequently been giving the foodstuffs we eat a lot of thought. Not what they are, but what's lurking in them. 

For example, organic versus supermarket standard. The only difference I can actually see is the price. But Googling around I find that there is a whole lot more than meets the eye. There is nothing quite as insidious as the food we eat. We are duped and conned at every turn.

Standard stock is irradiated and what this actually entails will leave you without appetite completely. Irradiation is the process of blasting the food we eat with ionised radiation which affects the food at DNA level. We are assured it does not make the food radioactive (within safe limits) and destroys microorganisms like E.Coli and Salmonella and delays ripening and sprouting of the fruit and veg. In other words, it is rendered inert. Dead. And we swallow that. We feed it to our kids. "If you don't eat your food you wont have any pudding!"

Dead stuff. Well, all meat is dead, and decomposing. That's what a matured steak is - it is decomposed to a point of optimal tenderness. And unless it is organic, it is packed full of steroids and growth hormones. This is what makes a six month old calf look like a full grown bull. And he is off to slaughter. Hung, drawn and quartered, rotted a bit and then dipped in Sulphur Dioxide to stop the green and grey bits from showing and sold as a prime steak. Don't get me started on battery chickens.

Dairy, which is where this all started, is just as bad. Any milk is a direct product of whatever the cow is eating. If the cow has a fabulously healthy diet one could assume a fabulously healthy milk but unfortunately, unless the cow is organic, the milk is full of steroids and hormones and it is then pasteurised which renders it inert. Dead. If it is then turned into commercial cheese, it is flavoured with chemicals, curdled with synthetic rennet, coloured with more chemicals and ripened with sterile bacteria and yet more chemicals. Yum.

Which leaves nuts and berries. Nut farming is reliant on, among a plethora of others, a chemical called diethanolamine which is fabulous stuff. It is not only used to produce our foodstuffs but is also very useful in the making of paint and adhesives, production of leather, making of paper and board and the manufacture of pesticides. 

Unless you are picking your berries in some wonderful virgin field far away from any GM crops, tainted water sources, high yield carbon emission factories and acid rain, you are probably buying them in the market where, yes, you guessed it, they are irradiated.

My solution of course for any dilemma is ice cream. But not even ice cream is ice cream anymore. Most of it is hydrogenated vegetable fat combined with reconstituted milk powder and chemicals. Chocolate ice cream shares an ingredient in common with engine anti freeze. Actually it is an extracted gelatin protein from cow hide and used to make a compound called gelatin hydrolysate. Delicious hey? Think of that next time you are settling in with your two favourite men, Ben & Jerry, for an evening of wild abandon.

So where does this leave us? And what to do about my ever larger bottom needing its own postcode separate from my own? Organic, is the obvious answer. As close to the natural state as possible, as fresh as possible and as lightly messed with as possible. And in moderation. Everything will give us cancer. Everything. Including stress, cell phones, the air we breathe and depressingly enough, chocolate ice cream.

My eye opener is to be more alert to what's in what we eat which strips the joy out of eating really. It becomes yet another discipline in an already too stressful life. But it does conjure up romantic notions of a home veggie patch where I get to say what goes into the soil and how much of it, and the exercise; two birds with one stone! I'll let you know how it goes, just as soon as I finish this fag.

Scar Tissue

I read an interesting quote on Facebook this morning from Paulo Coelho. He said we should be proud of the scars in our souls. They will help and teach us. And being me, I pondered on this a bit. I also hijacked it, with credits, as my Facebook status. Scar tissue in my soul. If that were true, that scar tissue actually did grow there and it wasn't just a metaphor then I am no longer flesh and blood. No, I am made of a web of hardened inflexible, solid bits, criss crossing every single part of me. And that scared the hell out of me.

I have no interest in being a survivor or a hero or a victim or the object of anyones concern or pity. Life is life and the battle scars we carry are all a direct consequence of the choices we make. Abused children excluded. I am talking about adult decisions and adult scar tissue.

"I survived two marriages to the same bloke" sounds shallow and stupid and in reality the first marriage was stupid and the second one even more so. Hindsight being the bitch she is, I can see that now. Sadly, somewhere deep inside I knew it at the time too but I thought I could love him better and that he would eventually "see" me for the amazing person I am. That's insanity. And proof of terminal self absorption and absolute evidence of some deep seated shit in me. I can see that now of course.

I superimposed virtues and graces onto the relationship that didn't actually exist; "all his potential" that he had no hope of ever living up to because he didn't know it existed in my head or even that there was this expectation and I lived in state of permanent let down-ness. My soul was in a sulk for years.

The fact that he had a debilitating addiction to alcohol is irrelevant to the point I am trying to make. I was so self absorbed as to have felt, in the first marriage, that he was "doing it to me", every drink, every binge, every fall down moment, he was doing it to me. I was so full of self pity and loathing that not for one second did I stop and consider that he was slowly committing suicide and this amazing person I loved was dying drink by drink. No, he was doing it to me, slowly killing off everything good and decent and precious in my life. And I was permanently angry with him. 

Long after our first divorce, the realisation of this selfishness in me nearly killed me. By some strange circumstantial twists of fate, we found ourselves standing in front of each other again and gave it another go.

What the hell does any of this have to do with scar tissue in the soul you might wonder. It has everything to do with scar tissue. Because I caution that nobody should ever ever embark on a new journey until the blisters from the previous one are fully healed and yes, scarred over.

While I didn't carry baggage into our second marriage, I did carry expectation again; the expectation that it would all be different. All my wounds were soul deep and still bleeding. And guess what? Alcoholism is alcoholism and the same drama unfolded time and time again. Fingers and nails scratching in open wounds until I could not take it one moment more. I was dying of terminal disappointment and of course, it goes without saying, living in active alcoholism is no way to live or raise kids.

Fate intervened again and saved both of us. He fell down overseas, far away from me, and I had to stand up alone and make the hard decisions, as did he, without the symbiotic self destructive crutch of each other to lean on. And we bled, both if us. Soul deep.

So why did Mr. Coelho hit such a chord in me this morning with his insights? The initial panic that I am nothing more than a mass of  mangled tissue at soul level soon dissolved. I registered that scar tissue grows over the same wound over and over, and I am not a tangled mess of soul deep inflexibility. On the contrary. The scars on my soul are mostly in the places I am most vulnerable, most self destructive, and thankfully, the tissue will always be a little sensitive. Reminding me, when I tread there, to tread with caution, and gentleness and discernment. 

Hindsight is a bitch, yes, but she is also such a sage teacher. We are now in round three, my bloke and me. We will never be married again; we don't even like each other very much it turns out, but we acknowledge the love and we are slowly finding a path forward that is healthiest for all of us, little people included. 

Which leaves me full of gratitude. I have no regret. My soul scars are my map for the journey yet to come. A wiser traveler, a seasoned adventurer, knowing the poisonous plants from the healing ones, able to anticipate the weather and most importantly, read the damn map! It's a grown upness that fills me with excitement, happiness and hope.  A clever man is Paulo Coelho.