I have tried other icings, Royal icing is nice for biscuits, doesn’t work for three dimensional Barbie cakes. I have tried Italian Meringue, aka 7 minute icing, although it didn’t take 7 minutes to make (it was more like 12 anxious minutes watching beating egg white and boiling sugar syrup trying to make friends in my cake mixer) and my children hated it, which disqualifies it for the Value for Effort certification. It also covers your kitchen in a fine, but irritating, layer of stickiness. I have finally found an icing that works for me. I like to call it satin icing because the texture is smoother and creamier than buttercream, it is easier to work with, stays glossy and luxurious and is just generally much nicer.

The secret is marshmallows, ordinary supermarket ones, preferably white unless you are planning on colouring up the icing. I couldn’t find all white marshmallows so I used pink and white ones, which combined with the yellow of the butter turned the icing into a pretty sort of peach.

You start by making ordinary butter cream with 250g of butter, 500g of icing sugar and 4 tablespoons of milk. When it is ready you put 250g of marshmallows into a glass bowl and melt them in the microwave until they are just soft, but not hot. 250g of marshmallows is actually quite a lot, but they melt down so don’t worry. The glass is important as it stops the marshmallows from getting too hot, you want to deconstruct them, not boil them. If the sugar gets too hot it will melt the butter in the buttercream and the mixture will split.

Tip the marshmallow gloop into the icing and beat. (Still using the heavy machinery.) The marshmallows transform the buttercream by lightening and softening it and setting it slightly so that it is moussy and glossy. It is easy to spread, gliding on instead of scraping on like buttercream, easy to smooth over and easy to make patterns in and when you use a piping bag it just eases out without any undignified squeezing.

I would like to emphasize that this does not taste of Marmite. The finished product is savoury, but not sharp or salty – and we are not pretending that this is a balanced meal either, it is very simply, spaghetti with Marmite – suitable for children or very depressed adults in dire need of comfort food, but with no time to shop for groceries. You can make this is 3:00am with what you have in the pantry at the end of a month when you didn’t get paid. Here goes:

Cook some spaghetti, now this is the hard part: before you drain it remove half a mug of the water from the pot and keep it aside. Return the pot to the stove and put in a large heaped tablespoon of butter and melt it. Now add a teaspoon of Marmite and mix. Add the pasta water and whisk until emulsified. Now let it reduce a bit before tossing the spaghetti back into the pot and mixing it all to coat.

You are done, serve and if you need a little protein to justify a meal, sprinkle with grated cheese, if you have  any and can find it at 03:00am.

My little flight screen tells me I am at 35001 feet above sea level and over the exact place in Africa where my geography fails me. Malawi, Kenya or is that Tanzania? Although I can see Mount Kilamanjaro over there on the left, my internal radar tells me that I am in a submarine, heading for very deep water, with the waters closing in over my head.

This week was already double booked, without this trip to Dubai. Besides the usual turning up at work commitment, I had booked to go on a design conference, worth a whole 2 continuing professional development points, my daughter has a ballet eisteddfod rehearsal in, of course, Pretoria and I have a presentation due at work – the one that will revive my flagging design career and return me to the fold of our oldest and most prestigious client. But no, I am on a flight to Dubai for an AGM (Annual General Moan) and a property development show entirely unrelated to my frame of reference. Oh, did I mention my father is dying, just a third layer of emotional overbooking I have to deal with.

I tell someone at work, who looks vaguely like me, that she is filling in for me at the Design Conference, she can go for free, but she has to sign herself in as me so that I can get the credit for going. A little identity fraud never hurt. I issue apologies to my swimming coach, personal trainer, the Book Club and at least one kid’s party invitation. I lie to the dietician because I have postponed my follow up appointment so many times she won’t believe the truth anyway.

I was sick all of last week, first with gastroenteritis and then with my bi-annual allergic sinus melt down (I hate spring). I didn’t have time to go to the doctor. Oh, did I mention that when I phoned our family doctor for a practical, balanced view of my father’s condition, his receptionist told me that sorry, but Dr Oliver had had a mountain biking accident and cracked two vertebrae in his neck, so no, I can’t talk to him, and no, I shouldn’t bother coming in either. I went to the pharmacist instead who lined up a row of over the counter medicine for me and said, “Now, don’t read the instructions, just do what I tell you to instead.” The result is something called the “Coryx Cocktail” which I suspect is addictive in a fizzy orange sort of way. I think large amounts of pseudo ephedrine are banned in Dubai, but from experience I can tell you that ten years in a Middle Eastern prison has to be less painful than flying with blocked eustachian tubes.

Of course the school has not been without it’s demands this week either. Yesterday was Heritage Day and in an irritating celebration of diversity all those children with a hint of foreign nationality in any of their previous four generations are required to turn up in national dress. Now we have national dresses from Mauritius, been there on holiday, and India, Daddy’s been there on business, we even have a Sari, but we do not have a Greek national outfit or a kilt, even though Daddy is entitled to wear a proper tartan. My mother produces a fragile heirloom piece which I declare unsuitable for the rigours of Grade 2, so I have to get sewing, a life skill I have never fully grasped. But since I have loads of time on my hands between 11:30pm and 2:45am, what could possibly be the problem? Oh, did I mention that my husband was away in London for a week. I never seem to get up the motivation to go to bed when he is not around, I do things like stay up all night sewing gold braid onto a velvet cap instead. So add sleep deprivation to the list of emotional hazards I am negotiating.

Heritage Day was yesterday, but the day before that was Rugby supporters day, so both children were required to turn up at school in World Cup Rugby supporters shirts. Pressed for time between visiting my Dad in hospital and trying to hold it together at work, I source the shirts from the tea lady at work who is running a sideline in cut price merchandise. The shirts cost me R80 each but the price tag still attached to them says R625. (So now we can add buying stolen goods to drug trafficking and identity theft.)

Our financial director tries to call a dress rehearsal so that we won’t all ask embarrassingly stupid questions about the financials at the AGM, but I have doubled booked an emergency root (hair, not teeth) appointment and a leg wax. I only have time for one or the other, not both, so the 11:45pm to 01:00am slot will now be taken up with waxing my own legs. Add S & M to my list of vices.

It’s touch and go as to whether I will have a job when I get back, for once the AGM promises to be more than the stupefying round of mutual back slapping and patting that is usually is and change to some healthy back stabbing. So we can add possible unemployment to the mix.

Let’s summarise: Over commitment, family crisis, lying, identity theft, illegal drugs, sleep deprivation, buying stolen goods, bunking, Sadomasochism and unemployment are this week’s vices. In the light of the above, eight hours of forced inactivity in front of the worlds best in flight entertainment system ever seems like a fitting punishment. Since I am officially off the radar, I am now going to watch 6 straight hours of the entire first season of Glee. Having perused the entertainment menu and rejected anything billed as ” brilliant”, “emotionally intense”, “thrilling, challenging or gripping”, I am going to pretend that the most important thing I have to do is watch very good looking American teenagers sing, dance and have sex with each other. Call me a shallow proponent of low brow American sub culture, it’s better than thief, liar, junkie or pervert.

I don’t usually spend my time in such rarified company, but occasionally I am called upon to be a good wife and mingle with the bank’s clients and their skinny blonde wives.  I am quite good at making natural shyness and social dysfunction look like aloofness and disdain, so I usually fit right in.  Staring off into the middle distance while holding a glass of champagne and wearing a hat is also something I am quite good at and since no-one was crass enough to mention the rugby I would have had a chance at conversation, except I know even less about Polo.

It turns out to not be a terribly complicated game.  Not much room for technicalities while riding at breakneck speed swinging a mallet around your head and since it is mostly played by inbred aristocratic upper class playboys there can’t be a lot of rules for them to remember. I fully expected to be bored,  anticipating something as exciting as croquet on horseback,  a bit of trotting to and fro, the occasional click of mallet on ball as it ambles sedately towards the goals to polite and scattered applause. Well, it’s about as quick as ice hockey on horseback, except you are not allowed to call them horses – they are ponies and the game is so fast you need a whole herd of them, as they wear out quickly, in about 5 minutes or so.

Not being a horsey person I don’t find it cruel or brutal, but it is  horribly dangerous and therefore rather exciting. There is a lot of colliding at high speed, a few tumbles – one pony lost it’s rider and hared off the field before it’s rider could get back up. Can’t say I blame it – a little while later a horse broke it’s leg doing a tight turn and had to be removed in a horse ambulance. The commentator assured us that the horse would be taken to Onderstepoort and rehabilitated but the ex-polo player sitting next to me said that that was a story for the children, it would be taken out back and shot. Apparently you can’t ask a horse to keep off it’s foot for 6 weeks. There was a lot of polite applause as the horse was driven away.

The whole event is sponsored by BMW, who must be salivating at the captive audience that fall bulls eye into their target market. In fact, as we arrived we showed our parking ticket at the gate and were directed off to the correct field to park, except that as we arrived the motorists driving BMW’s (about half) were directed to parking places closest to the grounds and those of us driving lesser cars were intercepted and directed away to the remoter spaces so that we wouldn’t interfere with the marketing. We parked between a Rolls Royce and Porsche and made our way to the bank sponsored shade.

I had been in agonies for weeks about what to wear. A consensus at the office said elegant horsey, which according to them is tight jeans, into boots, a pretty top and a hat. That would have been a good start as that is exactly what half the women were wearing. The other half were wearing cocktail outfits of varying success. This made for highly entertaining viewing between chukkas (the time it takes to wear out a pony) as variations on tight, high, short, shiny, precarious and see through tottered up and down the stairs adjacent to our pavillion.

This is actually a very long lead up to a long overdue “Value for Effort” recipe, courtesy of Inanda Club Catering.  The lunch, needless to say was very nice indeed, but the highlight was dessert – filo wrapped Lindor balls.  These are so yummily spectacular they are worth planning a dinner party around. Although I didn’t see them being made I can’t imaging they were any more complicated than this:

Firstly, and this is the hard part, open a box of Lindt Lindor Balls and unwrap each one, without eating any. You now need enough filo pastry to wrap the ball up like a bon-bon, enough to cover it around about twice and enough to twist the ends into a sweetie wrapper shape. Each ball needs a 2 ply thickness of filo, to seal the ball securely.  Put them on a baking tray and brush with eggwash.  I suppose you can now put them in the fridge until you are ready to bake them. These were baked, not fried, so I am assuming that you need a preheated oven, fairly high and that you have to stand at the oven door for the whole baking duration, not budging until they are gently browned. Then whip them out, sprinkle with icing sugar and serve immediately, while the centres are still melting and gooey.

There was quite an uncivilised fight over these, not what you would expect from the polo crowd at all. You wouldn’t think all those skinny blondes would allow something like this near their thighs, but I swear I had stiletto marks on my feet when I got home.

Politics, especially European,is an even more unlikely topic for the under eights, so you can imagine my surprise when I find myself, through a lapse of concentration, discussing Sylvio Berlusconi’s many vices; lechery, larceny and laziness, with my two daughters on a weekday evening. (For those of you who have been underground for the past ten years, Berlusconi is Italy’s colourful, or more accurately, off colour, prime minister.) Bedtime stories had proven unsatisfactory. The au pair had suffered her own lapse of concentration and allowed the girls to return from the library with a particularly poor selection of books. The girls had pinned me to the bed and were refusing to let me go until I read them something else. (Being pinned to the bed after 7pm on a weekday is a bit of risk, as the chance of me not getting up until the next morning is quite high.) They found the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be The Economist, the issue with Sylvio smirking on the cover, a man so unprincipled he comes with an age restriction, just not one that applies to the underage prostitutes he is so fond of. I agreed to read something to them from the magazine, hoping that the conservative economic focus of the publication will prove as stupefying to them as it is for me. Of course an article about Berlusconi’s is unlikely to be boring, but such is my fatigue that I go into auto reading mode, a technique I have perfected over 7 years of bedtime stories which entails disengaging my brain from the repetitive and sentimental nature of the material and either tuning out completely or thinking about something else unrelated to the hundredth repetition of the same old  beloved story. This is a mistake, because without realizing it I read an account of Berlusconi’s fondness for sex parties to a five and a seven year old.

“What’s a sex party, Mommy?” asks my seven year old, waking me up with a bump. I am not terribly sure what a sex party is myself, never having been invited to one, I think you either have to be a prostitute or a prime minister to attend. I manage a deft answer and steer the conversation towards a general discussion about why sex with people you meet at parties could get you into trouble. We have a little talk about getting pregnant and the dangers of Aids and why you should choose your friends really carefully.
“Why would you have a party in hospital?” asks my daughter. You wouldn’t I reply, but it turns out that she is under the impression that you can only have sex in a hospital. (Well, that’s the last time I let her in the room while I am watching Grey’s Anatomy.) In an impressive leap of childhood logic she has assumed that if a baby comes out in a hospital it must get in there too.
“Well, where can you have sex then.” she asks.
“Anywhere,” I reply, “At home, outside, in a car, in a plane.”
“How do you do it in a plane?” is the next obvious question. Now at the risk of sounding sexually backward, I don’t really know the answer to this one either. The person I am most likely to have sex with, my husband, (yes I know – yawn) is 6 foot 5 and broad across the shoulders. I imagine that members of the mile high club are small and agile. My daughters are now demanding a demonstration of how you would do it when not in a hospital bed, so I call for Ken and Barbie, whom I suspect go at it like rabbits every time we leave the room. The girls promptly produce Shawn and Julia, the names of the two chosen demonstrateurs, we have many plastic fashion dolls – they can’t all be called Ken and Barbie. We all have a good laugh until I decide the situation has gotten out of hand and I send them to bed.

Later that night my husband crawls into bed and extricates Shawn from where he is hiding under the duvet. He examines the lack of detail on Shawn’s plastic crotch and notices that inexplicably, he is wearing Julia’s silver princess tiara in his mop of synthetic hair. “You may have given them the broad concept,” he tells me when I explain Shawn’s presence in the bed, ” but I think you got some of the detail wrong.”

I was told by someone at work the other day, that I can not consider myself a true South African until I have run the Comrade’s Marathon at least once. We have an office member who was heading off for this patriotic event, hence the conversation. Now I consider myself reasonably patriotic, but I have never thought that dying for one’s country was noble or necessary. I vote, I own a vuvuzela and south african flag wing mirror covers, I encourage my children and my co-workers to embrace multiculturalism in a peaceful and productive way, I buy South African and I haven’t emigrated. But run the Comrade’s Marathon, no – I’d rather move to Perth. The premise upon which this argument was presented to me is, “You have to try everything once!” but since my own motto is, “don’t run anywhere unless doing so will save your life,” I put up a bit of an argument. Apparently, according to my new moral source, anyone can run the marathon, with about 6 months of training and a strong will to survive, even I could do it.The marathon is apparently run by a handful of serious athletes and an immense field of amateur dabblers whose only ambition is to make it in before cut off time. (I know several serious runners who haven’t done the Comrades and have no intention of doing so, claiming that the damage done to the body over 89km (56 miles) would put an end to their everyday running careers.)

However since my colleague is an unlikely candidate for athletic prowess, being about my height and rather spherical, and in a deft attempt to deflect the attention away from me, I asked him about his experience at the Comrades. It goes like this: he ran it once, trained for 6 months in a stupidly dangerous manner, ran the event and hung up his shoes. However, at the time he weighed 59kg, which is what I weighed when I got married, and everyone knows you are never as thin as you were on the day. Maybe six months of ultradistance marathon training is what it takes, since everything other attempt  over the past 5 years has failed.

Having recently decided that, based on my current physical activity levels, I no longer qualify to eat, I signed up the services of a personal trainer.The Sandton Virgin Active Website has about 12 to choose from, each profile sporting a photo and a short summary of their attitude to training, but as I don’t fancy being trained by a man, my choice was limited to one of the 3 women. One had short, pink, spiky hair and a lesbian look about her, one was an attractively fit blonde, but her motto was “nothing is impossible,” which has Comrades Marathon overtones about it. The last one claimed she would come to the house! This is critical because it removes the babysitting / driving at night / too cold to go out / gym too crowded / can’t get to work in time / can’t get back home in time arguments.

I asked her about the lack of equipment at my “sofa and duvet” equipped house, but apparently, unless I want to bulk up like Turkish weightlifter, I shouldn’t use weights over 5kg anyway and if I don’t think that lunges and squats are sufficiently aerobic or cardiovascular I am not doing them properly. She did sound disappointed that my house has no stairs but cheered up when she saw the long  and steep driveway.

The next level of excuse elimination is the medical questionnaire. While I personally believe that I am a rare and fragile flower that needs gentle nurturing in order to blossom and grow, the truth is closer to me being a tough and robust specimen that seldom gets sick, has nothing wrong with her and needs a good slap every now and then to keep her on track.  My only medical problem that gets a tick instead of a cross is migraines, which are helped immensely by any form of exercise or positive lifestyle change. I happened to mention that due to a car accident several years ago my right elbow cannot support my weight if my hand is turned in at 90 degrees. She frowned over this for a minute, as if trying to think of an exercise that would require this contortion, then dismissed it as irrelevant as we were going to be doing PT, not gymnastics.

The first session went well, I could do everything, tried hard and we had a bit of a laugh and a chat. The children stayed out of the way, and after the first kick in the ribs, so did the dog. My husband stayed out of sight in case someone made him join in and whisked the girls off to school on time as instructed. I felt good all day, except for the last part of the afternoon when I began to stiffen up a bit.  Apparently, according to the latest research, women respond better to all over body exercises, that use several muscle groups simultaneously, rather than single muscle isolations. This probably explained, why, after doing lunges with weights, I was stiffening up in an all over kind of way. The next morning I was so rigid with pain I had to roll to the floor from the bed and then get up incrementally so that I would only be whimpering and not screaming. If I had not known what the cause of such agony was, I would have checked myself into an emergency ward with instructions to test for a neuro-muscular disease. Eventually my husband convinces me that it is OK to take a painkiller, even though the injury is self inflicted, so I take two Neurofen and crawl into a hot bath, which in retrospect sounds like a recipe for suicide.

The next day I am driving the girls to school when Lizzie tells me that her teacher will not be there that day because she has just done a big race all the way to Durban and has taken the day off. I surmise she is talking about the Comrades, since it is the last weekend in May, but my surprise knows no bounds at the fact that the rather stuffy old biddy that teaches my daughter could do anything that astonishing. “Oh, no, it’s nothing like that,” Lizzie tells me, “She says anyone can run the Comrades.”

What we need to take with us on holiday is a highly subjective issue. I know this because other people go on holiday on a motorbike with one small pannier box on the back and other people (me) need a 4 x 4 with a trailer. It would help if we did things like go to Mozambique in December or Cape Town in winter where the requirements would be clearly winter or summer, but the family tendency is to go to Knysna in April or the Wild Coast in September where the weather could run from blistering to blustery between breakfast and brunch. This, as far as I am concerned requires two full wardrobes involving equally bulky items such as beach towels and warm jackets.

On the most recent holiday we were invited to dinner by a family who were leaving for holiday the next day. The hostess had invited 8 people and as the last of them arrived she decided to make a vat of Bolognaise to take with them the next day. This is in addition to the dinner she was already preparing for her guests. She hadn’t started packing yet, they were leaving the next morning and hadn’t done the shopping for a self catering holiday either. For me this is nervous breakdown material, especially since they were taking two large dogs, the family bicycles and three children with them too. (What do you pack for a dog? ) When I asked her what her secret was, the conversation around the table turned to packing in general. Someone’s mother said that when she travelled with her husband in their younger days she was only ever permitted a cabin bag, even if it was a six week European tour including mountain climbing and a trip to the opera. I would no more know what to pack in a cabin bag than I would if the trip was to Mars – breathing apparatus? Gravity boots?

It’s not as if we ever do go to Mars or even out the country much. The most remote place we have ever been to was an hour out of Bulawayo. This time we weren’t even an hour out of Durban, a city so full of facilities that they are planning a bid for the Olympics. They probably have more stuff there than we do in Johannesburg.

So the list of things I forgot this time is:
Sun hats
The new mega bottle of sunscreen
Tampons
Flip flops (for all)
Shampoo for the children (no, they can’ t use mine, it’s special)
Their conditioner (Yes, they do need it, especially when the sand and salt content of their hair surpasses actual hair)
My dressing gown and slippers
The right kind of contact lens cleaner ( I took the wrong kind, for a type of lens I don’t even wear)
Socks

Now looking at the above list you probably think I packed in a hurry or had insufficient warning of the holiday, or maybe I thought we were going skiing and the beach came as a surprise. Wrong, I had a full Saturday to pack for a holiday I have known about since last October. My husband farmed out the children early and then vacated the house until he thought it might be safe to come home, late that afternoon. He was wrong, I was not finished but I was close to tears.

For him packing is a minor exercise, to be undertaken at the last minute by choosing several things from each pile of clothes in his immaculately tidy wardrobe, a few choice toiletries and a bag of essential electronic equipment from his “man drawer”. These he tosses into the limited space I have left him on the top of the second suitcase, he chooses a second pair of shoes and he is good to go. Packing is an orderly and logical process, made difficult if you start from a place of chaos and panic. For me, packing involves confronting the deep and incomprehensible mess that is my half of the dressing room and the pile of pink and shiny paraphernalia that it takes to keep two little girls in socks and hair clips.

Strangely enough I did spend half a year backpacking in Europe, but that was when I was young and stupid and didn’t yet know that even a badly packed first aid kit could save your life. That sort of extra emotional baggage doesn’t help, neither does the residual trauma that remains after opening my suitcase while on a business trip to Dubai and realising it wasn’t mine at all. I never got over that shock, I still fully expect to open my suitcases on the other side and find that the contents have morphed into someone else’s handbag collection.

I once had a psychologist tell me that I am afraid of the chaos within, which is why I have control issues without. For me, looking into an empty suitcase is like looking into that void.

Occasionally we order, as a special treat, an organic chicken from the Organic Emporium, a ridiculously expensive online store that provides only organic fresh produce to a tiny area of Johannesburg. (These chickens were the reason for a recent completely necessary purchase  of a gravy separator - Work has been heart breaking lately.)  The chickens are fantastic, if a little tough, but that comes from the laps the chicken are able to do around their free range paddock. They taste like chickens used to taste when I was very young and the gravy they produce is so rich in protein it turns to aspic in the fridge. The establishment is run by a very eccentric lady called Debbie, who sends out a 5 page pro-organic e-mail rant every week with her store update. We recently received a long story  about how her child’s nursery school “accidentally – on purpose” forgot to invite her daughter to be the “baker” in Baker’s Day this term, because last term she sent along carob and stevia cookies which made all the toddlers gag and wretch. (Stevia is a horrible sugar substitute made from cactus juice.)

In order to justify the steep delivery charges I order other produce like eggs and honey from her as well, especially when we have our Buddhist / Vegan friend David around to stay. David will consent to eat an egg, provided he has met the chicken and assured himself that it is living a happy and fulfilled life. With Debbie is charge of sourcing produce I can guarantee that not only has she met the chickens, but she know their names and has helped them organise  unions to demand electric blankets… or whatever chickens think they need. (I am a city girl, I can’t pretend to know what a chicken wants.)

If she spent a bit more time scheduling her produce deliveries and checking quality instead of preaching to the converted she would not have received the e-mail that I have copied in below.

Dear Debbie

Standard Bank will send you a confirmation of payment for last week’s order. You will however notice that, while I have paid the R22.63  brought forward from the previous order, I have not paid a total of R51.00.

The ginger beer which arrived had already been opened and because the seal had been broken for a while before it got to me, it was flat. I have decided not to pay for that as ginger beer without a sparkle is about as interesting as dirty bathwater.

The second item I will not be paying for are the miellies. I have attached a photo of them so that you will understand why. I have never before seen a sorrier batch of produce. While I understand that organic produce is not going to be Woolworths perfect, I do expect it to be healthy. The only word I can think of to describe these cobs is “mangy”. They make you wish that the farmer had used some pesticide and fertilizer after all.

The item I have paid for, but am doing so with very bad grace, is the Buffalo Mozarella. I was quite shocked to find that for R59.00 all I get is one small ball no bigger than a plum. For that price I can go to the stupidly expensive Deli up the road and buy more of the yummy imported stuff for less. A product that has enough carbon miles on it to be able to say, “Ciao Bella!” on opening the packaging  should not be cheaper than a product made by buffalo that can only say “Howzit!” Now please, please, don’t send me a long and tearful reply about how much more it costs to hand rear sensitive Italian livestock on specially grown organic clover. I expect to pay a premium for organic produce, but I am not prepared to be ripped off.

Regards

Nicole Mason

Here is the picture of the mielies.

You may think that I had a lot to complain about, but I  have recently been accused, by someone whose good opinion means an awful lot to me, of being “ungracious”, so I deliberately failed to mention that the organic milk I received was deeply sour.  The organic milk from Woolworths is also always sour, and if they, with their famous cold chain, can’t do it then I will graciously let Debbie off the hook.

Of course Debbie replied with a long and tearful e-mail which I will not copy in here. Then in the 5 page e-mail rant of the very next week this is what appeared. I have highlighted in bold the phrases which I believe she has directed specifically at me.

“I had a chat to the farmer last week about why this cheese is as expensive as it is and agreed that there is room for customer education here. He is adamant that there is no authentic buffalo mozzarella currently coming into this country – not even the imported varieties that you can get in delis are truly authentic. There is a small region in Italy that does authentic buffalo mozzarella and he insists that they do not export the true version, they keep that to themselves and export another variety that isn’t authentic, it’s the only way to do ‘lots of it’ for export – authentic buffalo mozzarella cannot be done in ‘volumes’.

Every time you have a consumer –hand on hip – demanding cheaper prices that is not educated about the challenges farmers face – there is some farmer sighing in the background – an uneducated and demanding consumer has caused untold damage to our food system.

The farmer is adamant that if you want cheese cheaper, then authentic buffalo mozzarella is not the type of cheese you should be looking at and that’s fair enough.”

Yes, you are quite right Mozarella Man, Bufala Mozarella is a rare and luxury product, which means that I, and billions of other people around the globe, don’t really need it. That leaves me without a particular type of cheese, hardly a hardship on my thighs and heart – but it leaves your buffallo out on the street. Your demise as a single farmer of esoteric luxury goods is not going to damage our food production chain any more than the demise of Bulgari damaged it. It will merely free up your wetland for some another not even remotely indigenous farming activity, like cranberries or  quail. So if you truly love your bufallo you should find a way to fit it into my commercial reality and stay afloat. It’s not as if Mozarella Man doesn’t understand commercial reality, he was, I believe, a Johannesburg advocate who ditched his high paying career in favour of a farmer’s life in Cape Town, after becoming disillusioned about the quality of Caprese Salad he was getting in Johannesburg restaurants. (I quote the Woolworths Taste magazine here) It’s quite easy to become disillusioned about Johannesburg restaurants, most of them are pretentious, but deeply awful – but it’s  not an excuse for not doing your feed cost / organic clover calculations properly and ending up having to charge like a wounded buffalo. (Sorry, couldn’t resist)

Instead of making me feel unworthy of his cheese, which is what he has just done, he should do what the accomplished importers of luxury foodstuffs do. The Deli up the road that I refer to in my letter, Corne Europe Food, imports everything your liver disapproves of, operates out of a warehouse in Alexandra and is basically a shed with industrial scale cold rooms in it.  But by the time the lovely French lady has had her way with my husband in the cheese room he feels deprived if he doesn’t leave with at least R2000 worth of dairy. She assures him that he deserves it, and that the handcrafted pot of rotten cream, (so ripe it has to be kept in a special cage in the outside fridge in case it escapes in the night and frightens the dog, ) has been manufactured purely for him. (To compensate for the whiffiness of his personal choice, my husband, who knows I prefer my cheese colourless and tasteless, will bring home some Bufala Mozarella.) The cheese lady has probably been to Italy, met the buffalo, knows their names and seduced the farmer into letting her export his cheese. Maybe if  Buffalo Boy tried a bit of charm on his clients, instead of Advocate – level arrogance his buffalo will be around for another financial year.

So you can imagine my surprise when while in Woolworths the other day I find, in the fridge, next to the cottage cheese, a tub of genuine Bufala Mozarella with more stamps and  protestations of authenticity than a jar of mustard from Dijon. Except that it was a good R10 cheaper than Buffalo Boy in Cape Town is demanding for it, so my hand came straight off my hip and grabbed it off the shelf so I could rush it home and take a picture of it for Debbie.  However, my husband has refused to download the photo for me, he won’t even tell me where the cable is. He maintains that if I alienate Debbie from Organic Emporium he will never get a decent chicken dinner again.

In the past week I have appeared naked in front of two sets of strangers, which for a self conscious and rather shy person such as myself is a bit of a record. The second time was fairly unremarkable, being for a routine mammogram, done at a clinic run by a bunch of old bats and frequented exclusively by women over 40. Although they are all very respectful of your privacy, ensuring you are covered at all non essential moments, their matter of fact manner means you could quite comfortably swan around  without your top on and cause no embarrassment to yourself or others.

Mammograms really do not deserve the bad press that they get, they are mostly inconvenient but only marginally uncomfortable,  and you do get an avalanche of brownie points from the medical aid if you get one done.  However, in order to get the right angle of imaging you have to stand on tip toe and hug a large X-ray device while holding your breath. While your face is squashed up against the side of the machine frame you can just about make out the words “Danger – this machine is radioactive”, which considering I am only doing this in order to propel my Medical Aid Benefit Status from Blue to  Platinum, is a rather strange risk to take. I am not actually worried about breast cancer – the women on both sides of my family are notoriously long lived, my grandmother has officially been declared immortal and the others haven’t died of anything yet, offering no genetic clues as to what I really  should be worried about.

The doctor was a bit concerned about my bone density though. It’s on the low side of normal so she asked me if I did any exercise.  My exercise of choice is swimming. No, that’s a lie, my exercise of choice would be lying on a bed reading a book, the exercise I am prepared to do is swimming. “Well, that’s not going to do you much good,” says the doctor once we have established that I do it indoors, in a heated pool, “You need to do weight bearing exercise in the sun.”  I point out to her, that on the advice of my dermatologist, I have spent the better part of my life avoiding the sun. (Not because I am worried about skin cancer, but because I just find it a convenient excuse not to get all hot and sweaty.) But apparently vitamin D is critical in the fight against osteoporosis and I am just not getting enough of it. Well, there’s another piece of conflicting medical advice for you. They come thick and fast once you turn 40.

The other incidence of public nakedness was very embarrassing. While in the gym change rooms after indulging in my totally pointless exercise of choice, a little boy walks into the change room and looks me up and down. Now there is a point when removing a one piece racing swimming costume – the racing part referring to the style of the swimsuit and not to anything I do in the pool – when you are, for a moment, completely naked. This was the moment that he chose for his inspection of the lady’s changing room. So I tell him very nicely that this is the girls changing room and he shouldn’t be here, so he giggles and leaves me to put my panties on. Then blow me down if the little sod doesn’t come back for a second look! So I tell him, less nicely than before, that he is not allowed in here and not to come in again – which he promptly does, before I even get a chance to put on my bra.  So now I lose it with the little pervert and tell him no uncertain terms to get the hell out and leave me alone.

I am barely dressed when the little sod’s mother finally wakes up from whatever stupor she has been in and puts her head around the door to reprimand me for upsetting her little darling. I point out to her that the change rooms are plastered with signs asking parents very nicely not to let little boys over the age of four into the changing area. “But he’s just a little boy,” she whines ate me, “and you made him cry!”  The kid looks about 7 or 8 to me and I am kind of glad I finally made an impression on the little brat. “But you made him cry,” she is repeating over and over as if I was responsible for some sort of lifelong scarring. He’s only crying, not bleeding, so I ask her when she was planning to teach the little prince some manners when she starts repeating, “but he’s just a little boy.” Not little enough for the lady’s change room I repeat, beginning to wonder why I am having an argument like this.  I have small children of my own, it’s not like I am some cruel child hater, but I have a ” three strikes and you’re out policy” with my own children, so if one of my daughters snuck a triple look into the men’s changing room, tears would definitely be on the agenda.  I would certainly be too embarrassed to plead their case to a  semi naked person. Maybe I am just immune to tears, my daughters are always crying. They cry when the dog wags his tail in their faces, when they don’t like what’s for supper, when we run out of bubble bath, when it rains, when it doesn’t rain…… I suppose mothers of boys are immune to blood and alarmed by tears whereas little girls seldom hurt themselves badly enough to bleed, but frequently hurt themselves just badly enough to cry.

Now I feel sufficiently bad about the changing room incident to run it past a colleague when I get back to the office, who agrees that although the boy’s mother passed up on  a vital learning opportunity, she suggested that maybe I shouldn’t be so sensitive about being seen in a state of undress. This is not without foundation because  there are several male colleagues in my office who also like to go swimming at the same gym that I go to. I have however banned them from going swimming at the same time as me, pulling rank in the most gratuitous way in order to prevent them from seeing me in a swimming costume. They have, so far, taken me seriously, because I have told them that if they were to see me in the pool I would have to kill them. However, if any of my male colleagues were to see me naked, I may just have to kill myself.

Ok, let’s try this one – have you ever arrived at work  and had to sit in the basement for a while  because you have been listening to Leonard Cohen on the way in and are too depressed to climb the stairs? No? Still just me?

Right – anyone keep finding interesting things on their ipod that they didn’t know were there, because your spouse has programmed the thing with your joint music collection which, to be polite about it, is indiscriminately eclectic? No – you know how to use your ipod, don’t you? Well I don’t. At home, as at work, I am deliberately blonde about anything electronic. I am concerned that if I show an aptitude or interest in IT, audio visual technology or the electric fence I will be put in charge of it and I quite honestly don’t have the time for that sort of headache in my day. So yes, I have fallen behind a bit and I haven’t  worked out how to put playlists on the damn thing yet.

This means that I am the mercy of whatever musical horrors my husband brought into the marriage with him, a lot of indiscriminate rubbish he has downloaded and some very bad 80′s pop. There is an interminable amount of Bach (how many Brandenberg Concertos are there?) but I can’t find my Liszt or my Littolf. There is some kind of moratorium on Beethoven, and Saint Saens, of whom I am inordinately fond, has been declared “the bubblegum pop of the 19th century” by He Who Controls the Music, due to it’s high melody saturation. So instead I have to listen to the mind improving / altering selection that the Lord Of The iPod has determined will moderate my airhead tendencies. As a result there is quite a lot of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on it,which I usually skip over, not just because Nick Cave is a severely weird individual, but because, up to now, I have chosen not to nurture murderous thoughts. But like Kylie Minogue, who also had brief collaboration with Nick Cave,  I am a Pop Princess that has gone over to the dark side.

For incomprehensible lyrics about dark, obsessive love Nick beats Leonard Cohen by his  Red Right Hand. ( As you can see I have learned how to hyperlink so this post is You Tube interactive.)  Leonard tends to wallow in his suffering, an eternal victim of his own failure to connect.  For Leonard Love is synonymous with Goodbye. Fair enough, if we couldn’t identify with that we wouldn’t be sitting crying in the basement now would we? But Nick Cave obsesses about suffering in a completely different way – he likes to be the one to cause the pain and then make it sound like favour.

So in an unguarded moment I find myself listening to “The Ship Song”, which incidentally has been voted one of the top ten best Australian songs of all time – right up there with Waltzing Matilda. There is no actual killing in this song, even though it is a love song, but there is the very strange line, “Come loose your dogs upon me, and let your hair hang down.” Can anything good come from being savaged by a pack of dogs or is this the most sexually charged lyric of the past decade?

The opening line, “Come sail your ships around me, and burn your bridges down” reminds me only  of how the navy of Elizabeth I defeated the Spanish Armada by setting some ships alight and letting them drift, abandoned, into the Spanish Fleet which helplessly burnt and sank.  (I have actually felt like that before, like the Spanish Ships, not the English ones.) In a rare flash of poetic insight Peter tells me this line is about commitment, the burning bridges bit is about  cutting off other routes of escape. This would be a bad move because the song continues, “Your face has fallen sad now, because you know the time is nigh. When I must remove your wings, and you, you must try to fly.”

So this is the strangely lovely song that obsessively goes round and round in my head and will continue to edge me towards the brink of madness until I can replace it with something else. At the last count the ipod contained 2953 songs, somewhere in there must be something in there that is healthier to listen to!  Maybe this is healthy, instead of dragging myself up the stairs I now bound up the two flights murderously looking for someone’s head to bash in with a brick. I get a lot more done these days.

It would definitely be healthier if I listened to Classical music on the way in, then I would arrive, serene but cheerful, with all my brainwaves prettily synchronized. However, this is just irritating if no-one else is doing the same thing. I listened to a lot of Mozart when I was pregnant in the hopes that this would produce serene but cheerful children. The CD in my car included Laudate Dominum, which made me cry every time. Now that I am no longer pregnant I can listen to it without crying, but for some wierd reason it upsets my children inordinately when I play it. After a minute they are begging for Poker face, which has been banned, because the line – “Russian Rouletter is not the same without a gun”, has been deemed inappropriate for little children by the i-pod Meister.

Since I work in a drawing office, where people sit in meditation in front of computers all day, the obvious choice of music would be classical. The right combination of structure and variation being exactly what they need to produce coherent architectural drawings. However Classic FM lose the plot at about 10:30am and start playing Mahler and Bartok which are intolerable even to hardened classical music addicts. That’s why most of the younger staff use i-pods to scramble their brains and their drawings for 8 hours a day. I should get one of them to re-program my own i-pod but I am too embarrassed by the wierdness of the music collection to expose it to general office ridicule.