the one and I

something wicked

2026-07-19T20:34:26.474+02:00

By the pricking of my thumbs,
something wicked this way comes.
Open, locks, whoever knocks!

— The Second Witch, Macbeth

There are seasons when the world announces itself long before it arrives.

I have developed a sixth sense over the years. I know when darkness is on the move. Not the ordinary sort that evening brings, nor the kind that yields to sleep, but the heavier darkness that settles quietly inside a person until it begins to eclipse everything else.

It never announces itself with trumpets. It arrives in whispers.

It is there in the way my love moves through the house, as though gravity has quietly been increased. It hangs like a thin veil across his eyes. It steals his appetite, pares away his weight, loosens his grip on ordinary things. It is there, most painfully, in the slow disappearance of trying.

I have watched this enemy advance before.

Every time, I convince myself that perhaps I am mistaken—that I am reading too much into ordinary tiredness, ordinary sadness. Every time, that hope lasts only a little while before the signs arrange themselves into a pattern I know all too well.

I hate how powerless it makes me feel.

Some days, when I leave for work, the only thing standing between The One and complete surrender is poor Eva.

Our girl does not know she is carrying such an impossible responsibility. She only knows that walks must happen, breakfasts cannot be forgotten, sticks deserve chasing, and the sun, however reluctant, is still worth greeting. In her uncomplicated way, she drags both of us back into the world every morning.

Perhaps that is what real love looks like—a black Labrador insisting that life continues.

By the time I arrive at work, there is very little of me left to give.

That place has become a machine that demands more than just hours. It asks for spirit. Of late, it feels less like employment than excavation, as though each day it digs a little deeper, scraping marrow from bones that were already beginning to hollow.

By evening, I return home carrying whatever fragments remain, hoping they will somehow be enough.

Most days, they are not.

When my own mind grows too loud, I find myself returning to war stories.

There is something strangely restful about history. Battles have beginnings and endings. Maps change. Armies advance and retreat. Victories and defeats can be measured.

Lately, I have been catching up on a series about Rommel's early North African campaign.

In 1941, he arrived in Tripoli with the newly formed Afrika Korps to rescue a failing Italian army. Ignoring orders to remain on the defensive, he drove forward with astonishing speed, pushing his opponents back across the desert and earning the name The Desert Fox.

History remembers men like that.

The ones who arrive just as defeat begins to look inevitable.

The ones who somehow turn the tide.

Watching those battles, I cannot help wondering who my own Desert Fox will be.

Who will stand against enemies without faces?

Who will drive this darkness back beyond the Styx?

Buddhism teaches that suffering is part of the fabric of existence, not as punishment but as a reality of being alive. I understand that with my head. Some days my heart refuses to cooperate.

So I find myself waiting.

Not for miracles.

Just for reinforcements.

Morning always comes. Eventually.

I only wish it would arrive a little sooner.

Written by I

flowers of ice

2026-07-12T20:35:46.298+02:00

Apparently, old habits travel well. A week ago, on the very first night of our holiday, I rather overdid my weekend pour. To save space, I'd packed a gallon of cheap, dark sherry instead of a bulky stack of six-packs.

Let's just say the headache lasted two days. My intestines are still negotiating a ceasefire.

Anyway. I must have stumbled into bed somewhere around five in the morning. Just after seven, Eva violently excavated me from beneath the blankets, insisting that she needed to go outside right now. In my delicate condition, I completely forgot to disarm the electric fence alarm, setting the whole thing screaming the moment I opened the gate.

After silencing the contraption, we wandered unsteadily along the narrow path through the veld that circles the cabin.

Then we saw them.

Random chunks of ice scattered on the dry winter grass.

For a few bewildered seconds, I genuinely wondered whether I was having a stroke.

I'd certainly been enthusiastic with the sherry the previous evening, but surely not that enthusiastic?

So convinced was I that my brain had finally gone to glory that I immediately marched Poppet back to camp, fetched my phone, and returned to the scene of the crime. One deeply puzzled Labrador patiently supervised the investigation.

Somewhere in my gallery, there are thirty-seven photographs documenting what I believed might be my complete psychological collapse.

Later that morning, I showed the evidence to The One.

He looked at the pictures, calmly searched the internet, and informed me that I had not, in fact, lost my mind.

They were ice flowers.

They form on freezing, windless nights when moisture rising through the stems of certain plants freezes as it reaches the air. The expanding ice splits the stems open and slowly curls outward into brittle ribbons that look uncannily like translucent flower petals. They're impossibly fragile, surviving only until the first warmth of the morning reaches them.

It seems we'd chosen the coldest week of the year for our little escape. The overnight temperatures must have slipped below freezing.

Sherry-drinking weather, they call it.

Bah humbug.

I've found myself thinking about those impossible flowers a great deal this week.

By Wednesday, the fragile petals of our retreat had already begun to melt away.

My colleagues had thoughtfully cherry-picked a handful of jobs from my inbox before I returned, leaving the remaining forty-seven e-mails waiting for me. Within a few hours, my workload had climbed to sixty-eight live jobs—the highest I can ever remember carrying.

My work has never been a particularly warm place, where kindness often freezes before it reaches anyone. Some days, the cold there feels intentional.

I've spent months trying to grok that peace isn't something the world gives us. It's something we must keep finding for ourselves, again and again, despite the world.

Perhaps that's why those delicate flowers won't leave me alone.

They exist only because the night is bitterly cold. They're heartbreakingly beautiful because they subsist for so little time. And the same morning sun that reveals them also destroys them.

Our three days in the woods now feel very much like that.

A small flowering of stillness.

Frail enough that the ordinary machinery of life—the ringing phones, the endless inbox, my anxious mind—seems determined to crush it beneath its wheels.

Still, on one freezing morning in the middle of winter, the earth quietly reminded us that even the coldest places are capable of producing flowers.

Written by I

the road out of the woods

2026-07-07T20:21:07.507+02:00

It was surprisingly difficult to get out of bed this morning.

Even Eva—who had steadfastly refused to suspend her dawn walk schedule merely because we were on holiday—declared a temporary truce with responsibility and burrowed back beneath the blankets between us.

The reason was simple enough.

The moment our feet touched the floor, our little retreat would begin drawing to a close. We'd have to tidy the cabin, gather our scattered belongings, pack the car and point it back towards ordinary life.

The red dot on the satellite image below marks the location of the cabin where we'd spent the past three nights. Apart from the farmhouse and outbuildings tucked into the trees nearby, there was nothing around us for miles in any direction. Just bosveld, birdsong, wind through the trees... and a silence so complete it almost became another companion.

Lying there beneath the covers, I found myself thinking about the strange healing power of that solitude.

I'd wandered outside several times with a book in hand, convinced I was about to lose myself in a chapter or two. Instead, I'd end up staring into the distance for an hour or more, listening to... well... almost nothing at all.

It wasn't just me.

More often than not, I'd look over to find The One doing much the same thing, or Eva stretched out in a patch of sunshine, seemingly convinced she'd personally been appointed Minister of Relaxation.

By eight o'clock, however, the spell had to be broken. Time, unlike Labradors, never agrees to "just five more minutes."

So we climbed out of bed, folded blankets, washed dishes, swept floors and slowly erased every sign that we'd ever been there.

Packing the car turned out to be considerably easier than it had been three days earlier. We'd burned our way through an alarming quantity of braai wood and reduced an equally alarming quantity of meat to happy memories.

The space we'd gained in the boot, however, appeared to have been relocated directly to our waistlines.

A perfectly fair trade, if you ask me.

Our hosts kindly let us check out later than planned, so it was shortly after one o'clock when we finally rolled down the dusty road and began the journey home.

Back to ringing phones.

Back to deadlines.

Back to vengeful dragons and rancorous witches.

But this time, perhaps, with slightly steadier hearts.

Because while retreats always end, they have a quiet way of refusing to stay behind. They travel home with us in remembered birdsong, in slower breaths, in the certainty that peace is not somewhere else—it is something we can learn, however imperfectly, to carry.

Written by I

a cabin in the woods

2026-07-04T20:25:54.295+02:00

I was happier than usual when I clocked out yesterday afternoon.

I suppose it's time to let you off the hook after last week's little cliffhanger.

The Kindle survived. Well... it survived by not being bought.

Instead of giving my love a conventional birthday present this year, I had one of those impulsive brainwaves that somehow make far more sense once you've already committed to them.

So rather than bringing home another gadget, I brought us here.

We are, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere.

Remarkably, "nowhere" is only about forty minutes from Garsfontein. Hidden beyond a dusty five-kilometre dirt road outside Rayton lies this little cabin tucked into the bushveld, and somehow it was going for a song. Every now and then, life quietly reminds you that the best bargains don't fit inside shopping bags.

This, then, is my birthday gift to The One.

Or perhaps to all three of us.

Three nights in a tiny cabin surrounded by trees, birds, silence and absolutely no expectation that we should be anywhere else.

Our hosts showed us around, wished us well, climbed into their 4x4 and disappeared down the road until even the sound of the engine was swallowed by the bush.

Suddenly, it was just us.

I have never wished for the zombie apocalypse to happen more fervently. If civilisation collapses overnight, I reckon we've chosen an excellent place to ride it out.

There's barely another manmade structure in sight. Our little clearing is fenced to keep Eva safe, but beyond it, nature immediately resumes the conversation as though humans had only briefly interrupted.

Eva approved before we'd even unpacked the car.

While The One and I carried bags inside, Poppet exploded into a glorious fit of zoomies, racing ecstatic laps around the cabin with the kind of joy only Labradors seem capable of manufacturing out of thin air. It was as if she'd spent the entire drive wondering whether we'd finally brought her to the place all dogs dream about.

I tried to photograph tonight's crimson bushveld sunset, but the trees refused to cooperate. Every promising gap closed just before the horizon, as though the bush preferred to keep that particular beauty to itself.

You'll simply have to take my word that it was exquisite.

Perhaps that's fitting.

Not everything worth carrying home fits inside a photograph.

For three nights, we've stepped outside the machinery of ordinary life, just long enough to remember that the world has always been quietly turning without our help.

Written by I

on the death of a Kindle

2026-06-28T20:22:05.425+02:00

My days—and perhaps even my hours—are numbered. Remember this: in sorrow, seek happiness.

— Father Zosima, The Brothers Karamazov

My Kindle is dying.

Not dramatically. There will be no smoke, no sparks, no mournful electronic chime. It still turns on. It still holds a charge. It still opens books with the same quiet dignity it always has.

It is simply becoming... obsolete.

Fifteen years after Amazon released the Kindle Touch, the company decided that this generation had finally outlived its usefulness. No more software updates. No more shopping from the Kindle Store. No more support. A polite corporate farewell followed by a gentle shove into technological retirement.

There was a time when this little slab of plastic felt impossibly futuristic. Before it arrived, e-readers were cluttered with physical keyboards and navigation buttons. The Kindle Touch swept all of that away, replacing it with the effortless tap-and-swipe gestures we now take for granted. It felt like reading had quietly stepped into the future without sacrificing the paper-like calm of an ordinary book.

It is strange how quickly miracles become antiques.

This Kindle, however, was never just another gadget.

It was Dirk's.

My husband's twin brother passed away in February 2019, only weeks before the world itself seemed to unravel as Covid-19 struck. Over the years, this little device became something of an accidental keepsake. Every fingerprint had long since vanished. The books were mostly mine. Yet somehow it still carried the quiet weight of belonging to someone who could no longer hold it.

It is an odd thing to mourn.

Not the hardware. Not the outdated processor or the fading battery. But the invisible thread that ties an ordinary object to an extraordinary absence.

Ironically, it helped me accomplish something I'd been trying to do for decades.

Back in 1995, I bought a hefty hardcover copy of The Brothers Karamazov. Seven hundred and seventy-six pages of philosophical wrestling, theological debate and enough Russian patronymics to qualify as cardiovascular exercise. I eventually finished it, but only after the Kindle carried me through that famously swampy middle section where my paper copy had repeatedly defeated me.

Father Zosima's final words have lingered with me ever since: in sorrow, seek happiness.

I have found myself returning to them often this year.

Almost by accident, I managed to buy the final volume of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 - just before Amazon quietly closed the gate behind devices like mine. Book Three now waits patiently inside a machine that has no future.

So I've been reading more slowly than usual.

Every chapter feels slightly borrowed. Every percentage point is one step closer to two endings arriving together. The last line of 1Q84 will not only be the end of Murakami's story. It will be the end of the machine that carried me there.

My faithful Kindle will have completed its last journey.

Perhaps that's melodramatic.

Then again, perhaps all farewells are.

We had just enough savings to replace Dirk's Kindle with a brand-new one. I spent several evenings comparing models, reading reviews, and trying to convince myself that replacing one faithful machine with another was simply the sensible thing to do.

In the end, I chose otherwise.

I think it was the right decision.

You'll see why soon.

Written by I

call me kuebiko

2026-06-22T21:23:59.247+02:00

Kuebiko is a scarecrow from Japanese mythology: a weather-beaten deity who stands rooted to the earth, watching the world pass by. He cannot move. He cannot intervene. Even so, he becomes sagacious through aeons of silent observation.

In recent years, "kuebiko" has taken on another meaning: the exhausted bewilderment that follows tragedy after tragedy, when the world reveals itself to be stranger, harsher and more chaotic than you believed.

The feeling of standing helplessly in a field while events unfold beyond your control.

After several false starts, winter has finally settled in. We've had a couple of dips close to zero. My favourite season.

Eva's morning walk has turned into a murky, grey affair. We wander the deserted streets together like two lost souls searching for salvation. The world feels far away. Frost gathers on roofs and windscreens. The air bites at exposed skin.

When I get to work an hour later, it is still dark. It is only just before seven, as my colleagues drift in, that the sun finally rises. With that, the place turns into a black hole that greedily absorbs my existence until it is time to go home.

Sundown arrives at 17:20, when I am usually still making my way back to The One and Eva. By the time dinner is over, even twilight has surrendered. Night reclaims everything.

Right now, it feels as if the world is dark most of the time.

Part of that darkness belongs to winter. Much of it belongs elsewhere.

Work has become increasingly difficult with resignations double the number of new hires. Each departure leaves behind another gap to fill, another burden to carry, another quiet reminder that something is not right. Days blur together beneath deadlines and impossible expectations.

And beyond the office walls, the universe continues its relentless production of chaos. Grief. Illness. Violence. Uncertainty. One wave after another. The pace never slackens. The gods are unforgiving.

Inside, though, something has finally slowed to a halt.

Perhaps this is kuebiko.

The strain of the past six months seems to have accumulated like layers of winter ice. My mom's passing in January cracked something open. Everything since then has simply continued to pile on. Not enough to destroy me, perhaps, but enough to leave me standing motionless in the middle of the road, frozen in the headlights.

I spent most of the weekend trying to write this post.

The words would not come.

Every idea collapsed under its own weight. Every opening paragraph felt false. I would stare at the blinking cursor and find myself thinking of that scarecrow: patched together, weathered by the seasons, watching everything, understanding too much, yet unable to take a single step forward.

For now, I remain where I am...
standing watch through the long winter dark...
Call me Kuebiko.

Written by I

two

2026-06-15T20:50:06.991+02:00

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.

— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Eva's second birthday began with a pilgrimage of sorts.

Months ago, back when the year still looked orderly on paper, and the future had not yet revealed what it had in store, I booked leave so that The One and I could spend the day celebrating our girl properly. There would be no hurried pats before work, no guilt about deadlines waiting on the other side of the weekend. Just the three of us and an entire day set aside in honour of a small black Labrador who has somehow become one of the fixed stars by which we navigate.

Our destination was the park that has featured here in the past: a place of frost and sunlight, of coffee and long grass, of discovering that contentment sometimes arrives disguised as ordinary rituals. We packed treats and presents, bundled the birthday girl into the car, and found ourselves a quiet corner beneath the trees. The park was almost deserted. Eva, naturally, considered this excellent planning on our part. Why share an audience when the celebration was clearly all about her?

As I have mentioned before, her arrival in our lives on 9 August 2024 heralded a season of extraordinary change.

In the short span of her life with us, Charles died. We packed up one life and moved into another. We watched helplessly as vandals stripped away what we had left behind. Then Mary, too, was gone.

In January, my mother's sudden death split time neatly into a before and an after.

Even Eva's own candle nearly flickered out before it was properly aflame. At barely two months old, she survived poisoning and somehow emerged from the ordeal with her faith in the world entirely intact.

It is difficult to explain this without sounding absurdly sentimental, but perhaps sentimentality is unavoidable when speaking of those we love.

Through every upheaval, Eva has remained stubbornly herself.

She has absorbed tears, anxious silences, sleepless nights and the peculiar heaviness that grief leaves hanging in the corners of a house. She has met each day with the same uncomplicated enthusiasm. There are leaves to investigate. Sticks to catalogue. Rubbish bags requiring vigorous rearrangement. The neighbourhood, despite all evidence to the contrary, remains a place of endless possibility.

When the darkness persuades The One that the world outside the front door has little left to offer, Eva reminds him that she still needs her walk.

When my workdays leave me brittle with stress and the distinctive exhaustion that comes from navigating environments fuelled by guilt, fear and obligation, Eva places a tennis ball at my feet with the quiet conviction that perhaps throwing this object across the room is a more sensible activity than brooding.

She has no interest in catastrophising the future or revisiting the past. She asks only that we accompany her into the present moment.

Is this one of the reasons dogs feel inherently sacred?

Not because they are wiser than we are, exactly, but because they refuse to complicate what matters. Food. Movement. Rest. Affection. Those you love gathered nearby. The warmth of sunlight on your back.

At two years old, Labradors are said to be entering adulthood. Their bodies settle into themselves. Their impossible adolescent exuberance softens around the edges. The notorious Terrible Twos begin yielding, little by little, to steadier rhythms and calmer waters.

Our Poppet seems poised upon that threshold.

The wild delight remains. The wagging tail capable of generating hurricane-force winds is still present. The astonishing ability to redistribute fur throughout the house endures. But there is also something new emerging: a quiet confidence. A deeper steadiness. The sense of a soul growing comfortably into itself.

I find myself wondering whether we might follow her example.

Could this birthday mark the end of one season and the beginning of another?

The past two years have contained enough upheaval to satisfy several lifetimes. We have buried beloved people and beloved pets. We have surrendered old certainties and learned to inhabit unfamiliar landscapes. We have discovered how fragile everything is.

But we have also discovered how resilient love can be.

Perhaps adulthood, whether canine or human, is not the absence of chaos. Perhaps it is simply learning to carry peace within us even as the weather changes overhead.

By the time we arrived back home, the birthday festivities had caught up with Eva completely. She fell asleep on the carpet with one of her new chew toys tucked beneath her chin, as though determined to keep celebrating even in her dreams.

There she lay: our girl, exhausted and content, lost for a little while in that perfect stillness dogs inhabit so effortlessly. A black Labrador asleep on the carpet after a day spent being loved extravagantly.

Maybe paradise is not some distant destination awaiting us beyond grief and uncertainty.

Maybe it arrives in flashes.

And maybe our task is simply to notice when it does.

Written by I

on the importance of frost

2026-06-07T20:33:46.710+02:00

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

— Robert Frost

Though not the first frost of the season, we had the first proper frost this morning. The sort that lingers long after sunrise, reluctant to surrender the lawn to daylight.

The grass still crunched beneath our feet when Eva and I returned from our walk shortly before seven. It had been a subdued and abbreviated expedition. Poppet was moving slowly, feeling decidedly sorry for herself after a spectacular digestive rebellion yesterday. Back home, meanwhile, a biological minefield awaited attention upstairs — alarmingly reminiscent of events chronicled before. Some lessons, it seems, require periodic revision.

At eight o'clock, I headed to the shops for chicken breasts, the cornerstone of our household's emergency canine gastroenterology programme. Chicken and rice have rescued us before, and we were prepared to place our faith in the bland remedy once again.

Without ever discussing it, The One and I divided the labour between us. I cooked. I washed clothes. He tackled the far less glamorous task of extracting evidence of last night's catastrophe from the carpets. By mid-morning, I was pegging the last of three loads of washing on the line while Eva sprawled in a patch of sunlight in the courtyard, exposing her entire belly to the universe with the shameless confidence only Labradors possess.

The sun itself seemed quieter than usual. It drifted behind a vast bank of cirrocumulus cloud, the sky filling with thousands of tiny scales and ripples. My sister calls them "cold clouds". The name feels less like meteorology and more like prophecy.

Standing there with a basket and washing pegs in my hands, I found myself thinking about frost.

Most of us regard it as an inconvenience. Frost kills gardens, bites fingers, and turns early mornings into exercises in endurance. Yet winter's first sharp breath is also part of how the world restores itself. It asks things to slow down. It draws life inward. It quietens what has grown too wild. Beneath the apparent stillness, seeds wait. Roots dig deeper. The earth prepares itself for another beginning.

Perhaps that is why frost feels important.

Perhaps every living thing requires a season of retreat before it can grow again.

A reset right now sounds like a very good plan.

With work's twentieth-anniversary celebrations finally behind us, one source of pressure has already begun to thaw.

As planned, I slipped out at five o'clock on Friday afternoon while the festivities were still in full swing. I stayed for the speeches, naturally. One must maintain appearances before making one's escape. The speeches themselves were notable for many things, among them a complete absence of acknowledgement for the employees whose labour had helped build the company over the past two decades.

While I was packing up, however, a long-standing client stopped by my desk. She knew how much I had contributed, she said, and felt someone ought to say so.

It was a small kindness, but one that landed with surprising force.

I left a few minutes later, despite the certainty of a harsh reprimand tomorrow for abandoning the party early.

It was nearly lunchtime when I finished outside. My love had completed his heroic battle against vomit and other substances best left undescribed. The day gradually settled back into its familiar weekend rhythm.

There was coffee. There were cheese sandwiches. There was an exceptionally satisfying nap.

And, most importantly, there was a noticeable improvement in Eva. Half a day later, the chicken-and-rice intervention appears to have worked its magic yet again. Our patient has resumed demanding treats, supervising household activities, and generally behaving as though nothing whatsoever happened.

I find myself hoping winter might prove equally restorative for the rest of us.

The past five months have felt like living inside a storm that never fully moves on. Grief. Illness. Work. Worry. One wave recedes only for another to appear beyond it.

Life goes on?

Robert Frost may have been right about that, but the truth still startles me some mornings.

It is still difficult to comprehend that the steady, reassuring presence that anchored so much of our lives has simply slipped beyond the horizon. Even from far away, there was comfort in knowing my mother was there. A quiet strength. A fixed point.

Now the days keep arriving without her.

Terrifyingly, heartbreakingly, they arrive anyway.

Frost cannot change any of that. But maybe it can teach a different lesson.

The world does not stop. The seasons do not pause.

Like it or not, life goes on.

And somewhere beneath the cold ground, unseen and patient, something is already preparing for spring.

Written by I

conceptual substitutions

2026-05-31T20:29:24.504+02:00

Ticking away
The moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours
In an offhand way

And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

It's been on my mind lately, how quickly the last ten years have disappeared.

One moment, I was forty-two. My mom, at least, was alive. The future still felt spacious. There was time to change things. Time to become something else.

Then I blinked.

Now I find myself a dejected, parentless, middle-aged man, still occupying the same abrasive corner of the world. The same toxic workplace. The same exhausting cycle of guilt, fear and obligation. Fifty-two years have accumulated around me; somehow, I struggle to point to anything that explains where they went.

Hope itself has started to feel like another administrative task.

In 1Q84, Haruki Murakami writes:

Wherever there's hope, there's a trial. Hope, however, is limited, and generally abstract, while there are countless trials, and they tend to be concrete.

That landed uncomfortably close to home.

The trials are easy enough to count. Hope is harder to get a grip on.

Work will soon be celebrating twenty years in business. The last time there was a party of this magnitude, I ended up asleep on a stranger's couch with a Scottish Terrier curled up next to me.

This year, however, I've been too busy to contemplate such adventures. Alongside the usual daily chaos, I've spent weeks producing everything from custom popcorn boxes to a six-metre outdoor sign. On the day of the festivities, I suspect I will quietly disappear at five o'clock and head home.

The concept of time came up in another passage in 1Q84 when I was reading on Thursday night.

Time isn't a straight line. It doesn't have a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn't have any form. Since our minds can't picture something without form, for the sake of convenience, we understand it as a straight line stretching from past to future. Only humans can make that sort of conceptual substitution.

It made me wonder how many other substitutions we perform without noticing.

How often do we replace doubt with certainty? Chaos with order? Futility with meaning?

And if we can do that unconsciously, can we do it deliberately? Could a person substitute despondency with serenity, if only for an interval?

That was the experiment.

So I bundled The One and Eva into the car this morning and pointed us toward the same park we visited last weekend. My husband wasn't especially enthusiastic about the idea at first, but eventually agreed to come along.

I measured the journey this time.

Four-point-seven kilometres.

Seven minutes.

That was the astonishing distance between despair and a patch of winter sunlight.

The trip would have been quicker had I not found myself trapped behind a fossil in a Kia Soul who seemed determined never to exceed fifty kilometres per hour. For once, though, I kept my commentary to myself. It felt unwise to puncture the fragile mood of anticipation forming inside the car.

The park was quieter than it had been last week.

There was no spectacular faceplant into the creek this time. Just a leisurely stroll beneath the trees, followed by a smoke, a snack, and a long stretch of comfortable silence. Eva explored every scent within reach. The One sat beside me. Winter sunlight filtered through the branches and settled gently on the grass.

Nothing happened.

Which, increasingly, feels like a miracle.

For thirty minutes or so, the machinery of anxiety loosened its grip. The future stopped demanding answers. The past stopped demanding explanations. There was only the cool air, the warmth of the sun, and the company of those I love.

We came away lighter than we arrived. The hopelessness had not vanished, but for a flash it had been replaced by something gentler, which was the entire point of the experiment. On the drive home, we talked about making these outings a regular ritual — every weekend, if possible.

Fresh air does not solve anything. It does, however, remind us that not everything requires solving.

Perhaps melancholia is another conceptual substitution: a mind convincing itself that the storm is the entire sky.

This morning changed nothing. Time remains shapeless. The wind remains impossible to catch.

But for a little while, sitting beneath those trees, neither seemed to matter.

And you run, and you run
To catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around
To come up behind you again

The sun is the same in a relative way
But you're older
Shorter of breath
And one day closer to death

— Pink Floyd, Time

Written by I

a slice of sun

2026-05-24T20:30:17.535+02:00

Lately, life has seemed determined to happen indoors: beneath fluorescent office lights, beneath layers of grief, beneath deadlines, obligations, phone notifications and the endless small catastrophes of ordinary adulthood.

With my sister’s employer having moved offices, she now drives significantly farther to work every day. At least the new premises — perched on the fifth floor of a shiny upmarket office block — overlook a large green park threaded with paths and a narrow creek. During one lunch break, my intrepid sibling wandered down to inspect it properly. She came back so charmed that she invited Eva, The One, and me for a Sunday morning stroll there.

Despite a mildly rebellious stomach, my husband was up and ready on time this morning. We bundled an absurdly excited Eva into the back of my buggy and pointed ourselves towards Lynnwood for an uncomplicated fifteen-minute drive beneath a pale winter sky.

My sister and brother-in-law ran slightly late, which Eva considered a personal betrayal.

She fidgeted and bounced and nearly dislocated my love twice before I rescued him and took her for a short wander around the park entrance. A few minutes later, we spotted my sis and her husband in the distance, approaching with their two handsome golden Labradors, Hector and Victor. They hauled along what appeared to be enough supplies to survive a small apocalypse.

We found a secluded spot beneath the trees where the grass glowed almost unnaturally green in the winter sunlight, and settled in for a leisurely breakfast and an even more leisurely chinwag. Ilze and Cas had gone to enormous trouble for us: hot coffee, rusks, warm soup, toast, and even a camping stove and a small kettle for extra hot water.

At first, the dogs were in complete chaos: imagine three overexcited Labradors attached to four middle-aged humans by varying degrees of leash tension and entanglement. Eventually, the initial hysteria burned itself out, and they began circling one another with playful curiosity instead of theatrical outrage.

Before long, Eva and Victor were mock-fighting with the exaggerated drama of professional wrestlers.

Once we had eaten our fill, six of us — three humans and three dogs, though it somehow felt like more — set off along the winding pathways. While my brother-in-law stayed behind to start packing up, my sister, The One, and I were each enthusiastically tugged toward a different destiny by a dog convinced they alone understood the true purpose of the outing.

At the little creek running through the middle of the park, Eva became utterly enchanted by the flowing water. She lunged forward with such conviction that she yanked my love straight out of his Crocs in a fall worthy of slow-motion replay and a dramatic soundtrack. Our little hellion splashed triumphantly in the shallow water, and the three of us laughed so hard that nearby walkers turned to look. We switched dogs — my husband inherited the far gentler Victor while Eva proceeded to tow me around the park like an excitable sledge dog.

We only left around 13:00. Driving home felt strangely like passing through a portal back into ordinary life, where grief still waited patiently, where Monday still existed, where inboxes and exhaustion and memory still lived.

But something had shifted.

Back home, the three of us collapsed into an epic afternoon nap while winter sunlight pooled softly across the bed. When we woke, the world itself had not changed at all. My mother was still gone. Work would still be work. The sorrow waiting on the other side of consciousness had not magically evaporated.

And yet, we felt less burdened.

We had not transcended the chaos. We'd wilfully stepped out of its shadow long enough to feel the warm air on our faces again. A few hours beneath trees. Coffee steaming in cold air. Dogs pulling in every direction at once. People we love sitting close beside us while the sun quietly pours itself over everything, asking nothing in return.

Perhaps that is what contentment is.

A slice of sun.

Written by I

the dam wall

2026-05-17T19:22:33.001+02:00

Hartbeespoort Dam has been popping up a lot lately. Thanks to the very wet rainy season, the sluices have been opened a number of times, and the videos have been everywhere. It’s the sort of thing social media can’t get enough of. Water thundering over concrete, mist in the air, everyone suddenly a hydrology expert.

It sent me back.

My little family lived out there in the late seventies. My parents moved us from Brits when I was about three. Schoemansville was still a sleepy place then, tucked against the southern slopes of the Magaliesberg, with that big, shimmering expanse of water laid out below like something important.

Both my parents still worked in Brits. I was at a crèche there, Siembamba. Ilze went to a nearby primary school and then to a "day mother" in the afternoons.

At least, that’s how I remember it. Isn't memory a funny thing? It keeps the shape of events but smooths the edges, like water over stone.

Anyway, getting to Brits meant crossing the dam wall. There was no alternative. A narrow, single-lane road, controlled by traffic lights at either end, taking turns like polite strangers. And right in the middle, as if someone got carried away with themselves, a miniature Arc de Triomphe straddles the road. On the eastern side, a short tunnel through the mountain, just to keep things interesting.

Sometimes the dam would be covered in hyacinths. Great green carpets drifting across the surface. Beautiful from a distance. Less so when the smell came. It would creep into everything, thick and fetid, right into your bedroom at night. My parents called it “frog slime.” I can still smell it if I try hard enough.

So one rainy Monday morning, with the frog slime hanging proudly in the air, the three of us set off for Brits.

Naturally, the traffic lights at the dam wall were out.

Chaos.

Cars inching forward from both sides, nobody quite sure whose turn it was, everyone convinced it was definitely theirs. My dad gripping the steering wheel a little tighter, muttering things into his beard that were probably not suitable for a three-year-old audience.

And then, as if the scene needed one more layer, my stomach decided it had had enough.

I announced, with what I imagine was some urgency, that I was going to be sick.

There was no time. No bag. No bucket. No heroic last-second door opening.

My mom did the only thing she could. She cupped her hands and caught it.

Neatly.

Efficiently.

Like this was not her first rodeo.

There we were, crawling under the little arch in the middle of the dam, rain hammering down, traffic locked in all directions, my dad forging ahead because there was simply no way to turn around, and my mom sitting there holding what can only be described as a deeply unfortunate situation.

She must have been seconds away from joining me.

Eventually, we made it to the far side. Two lanes. A shoulder. Civilization. An emergency stop was executed with great enthusiasm. There was a partial disposal, a U-turn, and then a determined crawl back home through the same madness, now facing it head-on.

The rain didn’t let up. The smell didn’t improve. The mood in the car was, I imagine, complicated.

My mom, however, dined out on that story for years. Any hint of a weak stomach on my part and out it came. Fair enough. She earned that one.

And now, looking back, that’s the part that lingers.

Not the chaos. Not the smell. Not even my dad’s running commentary.

It’s her.

No hesitation. No drama. Just stepping in, quite literally, and taking the hit because that’s what was needed in that moment. There’s something almost sacred in that kind of instinct. No philosophy, no grand plan. Just presence. Just love, in its most practical, inconvenient form.

We spend so much time trying to make sense of life. Trying to control it, improve it, protect ourselves from the mess of it. But the truth is, it’s always a bit like that dam wall. Narrow. Unpredictable. Sometimes the lights don’t work, and you just have to keep moving forward.

And every now and then, someone puts their hands out and catches what you can’t hold.

I think that’s what I want to remember about her.

Not just that she loved us. But how she loved us.

Right there, in the middle of everything, without flinching.

Written by I

still speaking to you

2026-05-10T12:38:27.015+02:00

Beloved Mom

Today is the first Mother’s Day since your unexpected departure. For the first time in my life, I don’t get to say “I love you” out loud and spoil you with silly, mismatched gifts that always made you smile more than anything else.

I keep catching myself thinking I must tell you something — a headline, a change in the weather, some small absurdity of daily life. It still feels as if you’re just a message away, ready to give us the full bulletin. You were our mobile newspaper, after all. The world made more sense when filtered through you.

And the world, as you would have noticed immediately, has not calmed down in your absence.

We’ve had an abundant rainy season. Since January, the storms have come hard and fast — floods, level 8 warnings, skies that seemed determined to empty themselves completely. At times, it felt endless, as though the earth itself was grieving alongside us.

Then, almost overnight, winter arrived.

The rain pulled away toward the Cape, where it now lashes with cold intent, and snow has begun settling over the high ground. Here on the Highveld, the air turned sharp without warning. Frost, already — far too early. Yesterday morning, Eva’s poor little feetsies nearly froze on our walk. You would have fussed over her, I know.

You would also have had a lot to say about the state of the world.

Petrol has climbed to an eye-watering R26.52 a litre. The ripple effects of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran earlier this year are being felt everywhere, and the renewed surge in the Russia-Ukraine conflict has only deepened the uncertainty. Economies are wobbling. People are anxious. It’s the kind of layered, complicated situation you would have followed closely, giving us the highlights every so often.

I miss that. I miss you presenting the world to us in a way that made it feel less overwhelming.

Closer to home, things carry on in their usual, relentless way. Work remains what it has always been — a kind of perdition. There’s little space for grief there. The expectation is simple: perform, produce, continue. And so I do, as best I can, even when it feels like I’m holding everything together with the thinnest thread.

Ilze, too, holds so much at the moment. Her circumstances at work are not much better than mine. She carries your loss heavily. Despite that, she has taken over caring for your pets with her gentle strength.

It is strange, this insistence of life.

The world keeps moving, indifferent to the fact that you are no longer in it. The sun rises, people go to work, the news cycles churn, and somehow everything continues as if nothing has changed — although, for us, everything has.

But don’t worry too much.

We are still here. The One remains my anchor. Eva fills the house with her joyful chaos. Jane keeps her steady rhythm downstairs. In our own imperfect way, we are trying — through small acts of awareness — to make sense of this fragile, unpredictable existence.

I find myself wondering where you are now.

Whether you’ve settled into a quiet place. Whether there is clarity there, or simply peace. I hope, more than anything, that you are at ease. That whatever comes after this life has received you gently.

If I could, I would give you a dozen roses for every time you told me you loved me. There would be fields of red as far as the eye can see.

Wherever you are, I hope you know that those words never vanished. They are still here, woven into everything. Into who I am. Into how I move through this world.

And maybe that’s the closest thing we have to permanence — not the body, not the moment, but the imprint of love carried forward.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

I love you. Still.

Written by I

Stronsay yen

2026-05-03T20:19:30.475+02:00

I'm getting out, I'm moving on
And from now on, address unknown

Amanda Lear, Follow Me

We’d just started believing the water issues in the area had finally been sorted out when—like a bad sequel nobody asked for—another round of outages began. This time, courtesy of a major pipe relocation across Garsfontein Road. Progress, apparently.

There have been so many outages now that I’ve stopped counting. It’s easier that way. Let’s just say the taps work on a kind of “surprise me” basis. Every other day feels about right.

Electricity has been marginally more polite, but only just. We still get at least one extended power failure a week. Last week’s effort dragged on long enough to outlast even our solar setup. At around 2:30am, the batteries gave up the ghost, and we were unceremoniously dropped into proper, old-fashioned darkness. The kind where you suddenly remember that night is actually a thing.

Jane and I were chatting this morning while I was brewing our weekly batch of stew—an act that now feels less like domestic routine and more like survival planning. She was frustrated, understandably, with the slow crumble of infrastructure around us. At some point, she sighed and said she sometimes wishes she could just move somewhere remote. Somewhere off the grid. Somewhere that doesn’t depend on systems that seem permanently on the brink.

Well, as it turns out, she’s not just speaking theoretically.

Jane lived on Stronsay for a couple of years in the eighties.

Stronsay, for those of us whose geography gets a bit vague north of Scotland, is one of the Orkney islands. It’s known as the “Island of Bays,” which sounds charming until you realise it’s also code for “very exposed to whatever the North Sea feels like throwing at you.” The place has been inhabited for millennia—Mesolithic settlements, Vikings, kelp burning, herring booms. The usual island résumé.

But what stuck with me wasn’t the history. It was the details.

Storm pegs. Actual pegs for your washing so it doesn’t stage a dramatic escape during a gale. Fresh fish when you feel like it. Vegetables that didn’t arrive shrink-wrapped from somewhere far away. Local whisky, which I imagine helps enormously when the wind starts speaking in tongues.

And perhaps most appealing of all: interaction with other humans is entirely optional.

It’s about as far north as you can sensibly go without having to explain to people why you’re now technically in the Arctic.

And I have to admit, the idea lodged itself somewhere in my brain and made itself comfortable.

Just us three and the fierce North Sea.

No water outages. No power schedules. No passive-aggressive emails. No workplace held together by guilt, fear, and obligation. Just weather, tide, and whatever we choose to make of the day.

Of course, I know this is fantasy. Every place has its own version of broken. Swap infrastructure failures for isolation. Trade convenience for resilience. Exchange noise for silence, and then learn what silence actually sounds like.

Still, there’s something in the imagining that feels… useful.

Maybe it’s not really about Stronsay at all. Maybe it’s about the quiet desire to step sideways out of the chaos. To find a way of living that feels a little more intentional, a little less reactive. A life where we’re not constantly bracing for the next outage—literal or otherwise.

For now, we stay. We make stew. We charge batteries. We adapt, because that’s what people do.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, there’s a small, wind-battered house waiting.

And in that version of things, we are, finally, a little harder to find.

Written by I

the gentle art of mlem

2026-04-26T20:17:09.627+02:00

Eva woke me up at 5:30am this morning. Weekend luxury. A full 35 minutes later than during the week.

The last couple of days had been all rain and no sun. A damp, creeping chill had settled in, with night temperatures dipping into the low teens for the first time. Still, the intrepid lab and I set off within five minutes of getting out of bed. No hesitation. No negotiation.

This morning, though, the sky had cleared. To the east, a faint glow hinted at something better on the way. It felt like the day had already decided to behave.

It’s easier to appreciate the changing of the seasons when you’re actually out there in it. You can feel it happening instead of just seeing it on a screen. And really, it’s a quietly brilliant design. Tilt the planet, let it wobble around the sun, and suddenly nothing stays the same for too long. Imagine an eternal summer. Pleasant, sure. For a while. Then becoming unbearable in its predictability.

Doggo and I took it slowly. No weekday urgency, no clock snapping at our heels. Our 3km loop took nearly 50 minutes. We left in darkness and came back in daylight, which always feels like cheating time.

We slipped back into the house and closed the bedroom door quietly. The One needs his rest. Then it was the usual Sunday rhythm. First coffee of the day for me. A biscuit for Poppet. A quick scroll through the state of the world, which remains… committed to its greedy goals.

Later, around 8:00am, I went out for supplies. By the time I got back, armed with piping hot supermarket pies, my husband had started the washing. We ate while the machine churned away, and then I “helped” him hang things on the line. My role is mostly ceremonial. He has a system. I respect the system.

Eva, meanwhile, had found her patch of sun and collapsed into it like a creature whose only job is to absorb warmth and be content. Which, to be fair, is exactly her job.

She radiated that heat later when the three of us settled into a two-hour nap.

As I drifted off, I remembered a TikTok I’d seen recently, titled “The mlem almost put me in the ground.” That’s how I discovered the word.

Mlem.

It turns out there’s a name for that tiny, ridiculous, perfect moment when a dog lets the tip of their tongue peek out. Not a full lick. Very little movement. Just… a soft, absent-minded peep into the world. A mlem is what happens when a dog is so relaxed, so completely at ease, that even their tongue can’t be bothered to fully commit to staying inside.

Labradors, it seems, are particularly gifted at this. The classic mlem usually arrives when they’re on the edge of sleep, or already gone, signaling complete trust. No tension. No vigilance. Simply, “I’m safe. I’m home. Nothing here needs fixing.”

Eva does it. Of course she does. Our girl, our pup, our small, breathing lesson in how to be okay. There she was, mid-nap, sun-warmed and utterly untroubled, performing a perfect mlem like she’d invented it.

Eva, mid-mlem. Photo by The One, taken earlier this week while I was at work.

There’s something disarming about it. In a life that often feels driven by pressure, noise, and the low-grade hum of stress, a mlem is the opposite of all that. It’s a small, quiet rebellion against tension. A reminder that not everything needs to be managed, optimised, or survived.

Today felt like that.

After days of grey and cold, the sun came back. We walked. We ate. We napped. We did ordinary things at an unhurried pace. Nothing remarkable, unless you count how rare it is to feel completely at ease.

And maybe that’s the thing. Maybe a good day isn’t about fixing everything or figuring it all out.

Maybe it’s just this:

Feeling safe enough, for a moment, to let your guard down… and mlem.

Written by I

memento mori

2026-04-19T19:02:00.006+02:00

Ayumi was no longer in this world. She was a cold corpse that was being sent for forensic analysis. After, they would give her a simple funeral, send her to the crematorium, and burn her. She would turn into smoke, rise up into the sky, and mix with the clouds. Then she would come down to the earth again as rain, and nurture some nameless patch of grass.

This seemed warped and misguided, and horribly unfair.

— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Such were my ponderings when Eva and I set off on our daily walk at the crack of dawn.

That passage has been sitting with me for weeks now, like a stone in the shoe of my thoughts. Grief, in its rawest form, has begun to change shape. It no longer only crashes over me; it seeps in, quieter, more insistent. And with it comes something else — a growing sense of moriturism.

A small, almost imperceptible jolt: this is it. This life. Not a drill. Not a story for later. Just this brief, flickering glimpse of the universe.

Going around the last bend on the way home, we came across a strange spectacle — a thick jet of water shooting straight up from the middle of the road. Another pipe had burst overnight after persistent rains, turning the street into an accidental fountain.

For a moment, we just stood there.

Water surged upward with reckless abandon, only to come back down in an endless glittering collapse. Something was mesmerising about it — beautiful, wasteful, unstoppable.

And suddenly it struck me: this is how grief drains away life: not all at once, but in a constant, unseen outpouring.

I would have liked to linger. To watch until others gathered, drawn in by the oddity of it all. But practicality tugged at me. With a final glance at the ethereal spray, Eva and I turned and hurried home, hoping to get a load of washing done before the inevitable water shutdown.

The universe, it seems, has a sly sense of humour. As we jogged up the road, Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre began playing in my mind — the skeletal violinists, the eerie, relentless rhythm — looping without permission.

Back home, I had a quick coffee while Poppet crunched her strawberry-banana biscuit with great seriousness. The One was still asleep, cocooned in the quiet of the morning. We moved softly, almost conspiratorially, loading the washing machine and willing the water to hold.

While the washer churned into motion — its own small, mechanical dance — I returned to my book and looked for another passage that had lodged itself somewhere deep:

Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth.

— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

It sank in the moment I read it again. Not intellectually — viscerally. There is a point where life stops adding and starts subtracting.

The roots of my irrational fear of death can be traced back to a single, indelible moment. I was five years old. A group of children from my crèche were killed in a minibus accident on their way to school. Days later, we were taken to the funeral.

I remember the row of small coffins at the front of the church. Open.

Inside one of them lay Herman, my friend. Pale. Still. Unreachable.

Something shifted in me that day. Death was no longer an abstract idea. It had a face. And it had won.

For a long time after, sleep came reluctantly, haunted by the quiet certainty of endings.

Maybe that is why loss cuts so deeply. Not only because someone is gone, but because it holds up a mirror. It shows you, without flinching, where you, too, are heading.

And yet, this realisation is not meant to paralyse. There is an older wisdom that holds it differently. Memento mori — remember that you must die. Not a threat, but an invitation.

A reminder to strip life down to what matters. To see through the noise, the accumulation, the small, frantic distractions. To live, not as if time is limitless, but as if it is precisely what it is: fleeting, fragile, and immeasurably precious.

My mom’s passing has made that impossible to ignore.

No second chances wait somewhere ahead. No warming-up room offstage. As Kundera wrote,

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold; the dress rehearsal for life is life itself.

— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

So we walk.

We love.

We lose.

What if the dance was never meant to be feared, only recognised? Perhaps it is the quiet rhythm we are already moving to, whether we notice it or not.

Written by I

crystal moon

2026-04-12T20:15:00.000+02:00

Taking Eva out for her bedtime constitutional after my last post, I noticed the sky had cleared. There it was — a full moon, steady and unbothered, hanging above the lawn. The sight of it softened the edges of what had been a hectic birthday.

The moon has been calling for our attention again. After decades of relative obscurity, it has returned to the news — fly-bys, renewed ambitions, plans to place human footprints back onto its ancient surface. There is talk now of staying, not merely visiting. Of building something that will endure.

The moon even found its way into my reading time:

Tengo's mind emptied as he stared at the moon. Memories that had been handed down from antiquity began to stir. Before human possessed fire or tools or language, the moon had been their ally. It would calm people's fears by illuminating the dark world like a heavenly lantern. Its waxing and waning gave them an understanding of the concept of time. Even now, when darkness had been banished from most of the world, there remained a sense of gratitude toward the moon and its unconditional compassion. It was imprinted upon human genes like a comforting, collective memory.

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Perhaps that is why it draws the past closer.

In 2011, another kind of transition was taking place. The final Space Shuttle mission came home, and a long chapter silently closed. Atlantis touched down for the last time, and the way to reach beyond the sky seemed to vanish. Yet in that same year, attention shifted back to the moon... albeit from a safe distance. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circled above the moon's surface, sending back images so precise they revealed not just where we had been, but how we had moved there — the faint trails of astronauts still etched into dust that does not forget.

While that was unfolding on a planetary scale, something quieter — but no less improbable — was happening down here.

There was a small wedding.

Two lives, carried along their own uncertain orbits, found alignment. Not with spectacle, not with fanfare, but with the certainty that arrives without asking permission. Across distances measured in time, two specks of dust settled beside one another and chose to remain.

My mom stood there with us. She signed her name as witness, marking the moment in ink — a simple act, and yet one that now feels impossibly vast.

Fifteen years have passed since then. A crystal anniversary, they call it. Crystal — formed slowly under pressure, holding light rather than producing it. Clear, but never simple.

Grief has a way of refracting everything. Since January, the light has not fallen cleanly. It bends, splits, catches on edges I didn’t know were there. Words have come harder. The quiet audience I always wrote for — the one who read everything, who held each post with care — is no longer here to receive it.

And so I falter.

But the moon does not.

It continues its patient cycle, unchanged by absence. It reflects what light it is given, offering it back without judgment, without expectation. Perhaps that is all that is required of us, too. Not to generate brilliance, not to force meaning, but simply to reflect — to hold what light we can, however fractured, and let it be seen.

Fifteen years. A lifetime in miniature. A breath, in the scale of things.

The moon will be visited again. New footprints will cross old ones. Dust will be disturbed, but never erased. The past will remain there, placidly intact, waiting for anyone who cares to look closely enough.

Maybe that is what memory is.

Not something we move on from, but something we circle. Returning, again and again, each time seeing it differently, each time carrying a slightly altered light.

Tonight, the moon hangs as it always has. Not closer. Not further. Just present.

And here we are, still held in its reflection.

Written by I

unbirthday

2026-04-02T19:53:00.002+02:00

My 52nd birthday started with a bang.

I took the day off, imagining a soft sort of celebration at home with my dearest and Eva, instead of spending it at my desk, absent-mindedly chewing at my thumb while jobs stacked up around me.

Perhaps stubbornly, I decided to keep to the routine. There is comfort in repetition, even on days that insist on being different. So Eva and I stepped out into the dark at 5:00 a.m. for our usual brisk walk around the block. The air still had that pre-dawn chill, the kind that wakes you up in a way coffee can’t quite manage.

By 5:20 a.m., we were home again. The One was still asleep, wrapped in the peaceful, unreachable place that mornings belong to. Eva crunched industriously through a treat while I stood with a steaming mug, watching the first thin suggestion of light stretch itself across the sky.

My husband joined us not long after and, in his gentle, generous way, made sure I felt celebrated. Among the gifts was something I have wanted for years: a sturdy telescopic metal back scratcher. Practical, slightly ridiculous, and absolutely perfect. I laughed more than I expected to, extending and retracting it like a small, improbable fidget toy.

For a brief moment, everything felt easy. Held. Not untouched, but intact.

At 6:15 a.m., the power went out.

It was sudden enough to feel personal. Also rare enough to be suspicious, especially given the supposed reliability of the solar backup. We worked through the usual checks before realising that one of the geysers had tripped the system.

Outside, the problem made itself known without subtlety. A steady, steaming waterfall poured down the edges of the carport where my love's car lives. It was as if the house had decided to mark the occasion in its own dramatic fashion.

There’s a particular kind of efficiency that comes with minor domestic crises. We handed things over to the landlords, shut off the water mains in the street, switched the geyser off at the DB, and restored electricity to the rest of the house. Contained, if not resolved.

Exactly what is it with us and geysers?

Since life refuses to align its errands with sentiment, I did a quick dash to the shops for toilet paper and vape coils at 9:00 a.m.. I was back home within the hour. A plumber arrived, assessed, nodded in that way that suggests both understanding and future inconvenience, and left again.

My sister stopped by soon after, just long enough to say happy birthday and press a gift into my hands. A meticulously hand-bound hardcover of The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse. Handwritten, illustrated, quietly profound. The kind of book you don’t just read, but cherish. It felt, in that moment, far larger than the sum of its pages.

The plumber returned in a van loaded with supplies and set about replacing the busted geyser.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, the day began to turn.

I found myself thinking of last year. Of how birthdays seem to gather their own strange gravity. Last year’s came with news that hollowed everything out, leaving us standing in a dark void.

I still haven’t re-watched that video. I’m not sure I ever will.

It feels, at times, like certain days don’t pass so much; instead, they echo. Sorting through photos for my mom's memorial, I'd found a blurry old snap of the two young lovers my parents had been.

In addition to today being my birthday, they would have been married for 55 years. Good Friday, 2 April 1971. An early autumn day chosen with care, or perhaps simply with hope. My mother was nineteen. My father was barely twenty-two. Young enough to believe in beginnings without needing to account for endings.

My sister arrived later that same year, impatient and slightly ahead of schedule. On the other hand, I took my time, arriving a couple of days late, neatly positioning myself on their third anniversary—as if I had always intended to bind those dates together.

There are no photographs of their wedding. Only this—before.

The official explanation has always been that the photographer’s camera malfunctioned, that nothing came out. It’s a story that was accepted because it had to be. I have, over the years, constructed other possibilities in the quiet corners of my mind, but they don’t matter now. Both my mother and father are gone, and with them, the need to resolve small mysteries that no longer change anything.

Absence has a way of simplifying the narrative.

With the loss of my mom, the fundamentals have shifted. It is not just that she is missing. It is that the axis has tilted. The quiet, unspoken acknowledgement that two people who existed and made me possible—who anchored this date somewhere beyond myself—are no longer there.

Birthdays, it turns out, are not self-contained.

Now, without my parents, the day feels unmoored. As though it belongs to a story already told, and I am rereading a chapter stripped of its original context.

So this is what it becomes.

Not a birthday.

Not really.

Something adjacent.

Something altered.

A marker of time, yes—but also of absence.

Of continuation, in the face of a story that has lost two of its central characters.

Happy unbirthday.

Written by I

1202

2026-03-29T15:21:00.004+02:00

It’s been a strange, almost psychedelic stretch since my previous post.

To be honest, it feels like I ate one of the mushrooms growing all over the lawn.

Not metaphorically. Literally. As if I picked one, wiped it on my shirt, and swallowed it whole. Everything has felt slightly wrong lately. Too bright. Too loud. Too urgent. Like the world slipped half a degree off its axis and nobody told me.

The lawn is full of them now. Little brown domes pushing through the wet grass, like they were always there and we just never noticed. I took a photo this morning because they looked staged. Planted. And that’s when it started to make sense. Or rather, stopped making sense in a very specific way.

I remember the exact moment the chaos began.

I had just finished reading a pivotal chapter of 1Q84. One of those chapters that makes you stop, stare at the ceiling, and check whether the air in the room feels different. In the book, there’s thunder. Distant. Ominous. The kind that feels less like weather and more like a warning.

As I switched my Kindle off, there it was. Real thunder. The same sound. The same distance. The same menacing pause afterwards.

Something shifted right then. Not dramatically. Just enough to matter.

Most of what followed was work. Endless work. Work that multiplied when you looked away from it. Work that refused to stay done once it was finished.

There was also a brief but intense altercation with my other half. The strange thing about two introverted, gentle people fighting is that there are no raised voices. No slammed doors. Just silence that becomes sharper and sharper until it finally cuts.

It ended in tears. Of course it did.

Work did not calm down, either. It escalated.

One of the lowlights was a Christian minister telling me, with remarkable nastiness, how unprofessional my designs were. Twice. As if the first attack hadn’t landed properly, and he needed a second attempt to make sure the blade went in.

Then came the war room. I stood there, shaking inside my trousers, trying to explain myself to a panel after a supplier reported me for being rude. I wasn’t rude. I was exhausted. Which, apparently, counts as the same thing.

Around then, people started disappearing. Random sick days. Five people gone at one stage. Just… gone. And on my side of the screen, more than seventy jobs blinked red like a cockpit warning system seconds before impact.

My shoulders and neck became knots of excruciating tension. My love kindly pounded out the painful spasms with arnica and brute force.

By Friday, I felt like I’d crawled through a river full of piranhas and survived only because there was nothing left worth eating.

I overdid the pour last weekend.

There’s no gentle way to say that. I overdid it. By 6:00am on Saturday, I was still online. My love stumbled out of the bedroom with that stunned, just-woken look and asked me why I was still awake.

I hadn’t gone to bed.

When he found me, I was discussing the state of world affairs with a complete stranger on the other side of the planet. It felt perfectly normal at the time. Now it feels like something that happens in a dream you can’t wake up from.

Eva got only the briefest walk because it was raining. Also, because my gut had turned into an emergency situation that required immediate access to a latrine.

Sunday faded into a flat grey blur. The rain didn’t stop. The anxiety didn’t stop. And another week in perdition was already sharpening its teeth.

The week did exactly what I expected it to do. It hurt.

By Friday, I had a fresh set of wounds and a growing suspicion that the universe was quietly keeping score. I tried to stay out of trouble. I really did. But trouble has a way of finding you when you’re already too tired to move.

Even the sacred weekend wasn’t spared.

Early yesterday morning, work called. Urgent. A printing glitch. Books needed for a conference starting at 15:00. No time for reflection. No time for resentment. Just movement.

So I went in. Flattened layers. Resized files. Printed. Decollated. Replaced. Re-collated. Stapled. Trimmed. Two and a half hours of repairing a mistake that wasn’t mine.

It felt like paying a fine in a language I don’t speak.

Last night, for the first time in months, there was a second weekend pour.

Because there’s a word for what this feels like.

1202.

The tipping point. The moment when the brain receives more tasks than it can process. When every item becomes urgent. When you feel too guilty to postpone anything, everything rises to the top of the list at the same time. Nothing moves. Nothing gets done. You just freeze.

During the near-disastrous Apollo 11 descent, the 1202 alarm meant the computer was overloaded. Too much data. Not enough capacity.

Still, they landed.

I’m not sure I will.

In 1Q84, once a reality shifts, it doesn’t shift back. There are no neat returns. No rewinds. The previous world simply stops existing, and you are left standing in the new one, wondering why the sky feels wrong.

So today I tried something reckless.

I tried to force a different timeline into existence.

At dawn, Eva and I took a longer walk than usual. Not rushed. Not apologetic. Just slow. Calm. Deliberate. I made a quiet decision while we were out there: nothing insane was allowed to follow me home. Not work. Not panic. Not dread.

Later, after a beautiful snooze, we decided to give ourselves a good sunning. While The One hung out the washing, Poppet and I walked through the potted garden like inspectors from a kinder universe.

The tomato is in a terrible state. Blight has taken huge bites out of it, and the pestilence was too far gone when I got around to spraying copper soap. Leaves dying. Stems tired. Everything looks like it should give up.

But, like Apollo 11, it hasn’t.

There are still fruits hanging there. Green. Defiant. Ordinary in the most reassuring way possible. I took a photo because it felt like proof that something can struggle and still continue without drama.

The sun got too hot, and we retreated indoors.

I avoided the mushrooms on the lawn. I don’t trust them anymore. They feel like portals. If you stare at them long enough, the world around you will change again.

Maybe this is just what 1202 feels like. Not chaos, exactly. Just too much reality arriving at the same time.

And somewhere inside all of it, a Labrador still needs a walk. Tomatoes still grow. Washing still dries in the sun. And a man still sits here, trying to convince himself that the landing is going to be gentle.

Written by I

sonder

2026-03-15T14:36:00.003+02:00

Sonder: the quiet realisation that every passer-by is living a life as complex and vivid as your own — a story unfolding beyond the small circle of your awareness.

I've always maintained that The One leads a charmed life, of a kind. He hardly ever deals with the forbidding world outside. His contact with the restless monsters beyond our gate is mostly limited to fleeting online encounters, buffered by screens and passwords and distance.

I used to think my family lived under a similar spell.

Growing up, I carried the unspoken conviction that we were somehow set apart. My bloodline stretches back to the first Dutch settlers who arrived in this unforgiving place centuries ago. My forefathers include Voortrekkers who abandoned the Cape and crossed the Drakensberg with little more than stubborn faith, as well as men and women who fought and died in the two Boer wars. Generations who carved out a life in a land that has never been gentle.

It gave me the impression that our story meant something. That it stood a little higher than the rest.

Age has been steadily dissolving that illusion. As I grow older, I’ve slowly come to grasp that nobody here is, in fact, special.

At some point, I came across a word that captures this realisation: sonder.

It describes the moment you understand that every stranger you run into has an existence as rich and intricate as yours. Each person is the centre of their own story, surrounded by their own cast of family, friends, ambitions, failures and private jokes. Their lives continue whether you see them or not. When you leave the scene, their story keeps unfolding, dense with memories and moments you will never witness.

To them, you might appear only once.

A passing car in the rain.

A blurred figure on a pavement.

A lighted window at night.

The rain has been relentless this past week. It drums on the roof, seeps into the soil, muddles the edges of everything. Taking a beery slash just after midnight last Saturday, I noticed the faint glow of Menlyn Maine through the open bathroom window. Half-hidden by rain and darkness, its distant lights scattered like whispered signals from lives unfolding far beyond my reach.

For a long time, I simply stood there and watched.

Behind each of those lights is a room.

Inside each room is a person.

They are living out their own grave catastrophes and small triumphs. They are grieving the dead, worrying about bills, laughing with friends, washing dishes, staring into their own dark windows. They carry entire histories inside them, most of which will never brush against mine.

And yet we all move through the same rain.

Lately, my own story feels narrow and dim. Since the seventh of January, the world has been completely off its axis. Grief has a way of shrinking the horizon until everything collapses inward around a single absence.

Buddhism tells us that this, too, is part of the path. That the illusions we cling to eventually loosen their grip. That the self we guard so fiercely is not as solid as we imagine. Recognising the vastness of everyone else's story may be one of the silent waypoints along that road.

A humbling cognisance.

Because sooner or later, every one of these stories ends the same way. The lights go out. The rooms empty. The rain continues falling on a world that forgets us almost immediately.

And yet, for a brief while, each of us is convinced we are the centre of the universe.

Perhaps that is the only charm any life ever truly has.

Written by I

the first glimmer

2026-03-01T20:33:00.001+02:00

Glimmers are the opposite of triggers.

They are small, almost imperceptible cues that tell the nervous system: you are safe. You are connected. You are still here. Where a trigger tightens the chest and narrows the world, a glimmer softens the edges. It steadies the breath. It lets a thin ribbon of light slip in.

They are rarely grand in scale. Most often, they are sensory. Fleeting. Easy to miss.

I cancelled yesterday entirely.

I had my weekly pour on Friday night and only slithered into bed around 1:30am, warm with beer and false clarity. What felt like moments later, the alarm went off. I hauled myself upright like an unwilling marionette, strings pulled by duty rather than desire.

Eva and I stepped into a fine, stubborn rain. She trotted; I trudged. The streets were soaked and colourless, and I moved through them on autopilot. I remember very little of that walk, except the sound of her harness tags and the damp creeping into my sleeves.

Back home, I turned into a yeasty vegetable and stayed that way. I drifted from desk to kettle to bed. The day slid past without asking anything of me, and I was grateful for that.

My love was not himself either. We passed one another gently, carefully, like two ghosts who once shared a house and are not quite sure how to inhabit it now. There was no quarrel, no sharpness. Just a quiet misalignment. A shared fatigue that sat between us.

I always sleep well after a binge, and this morning I woke clearer. Not bright, not buoyant. Just clearer.

The rain had gone. Eva and I set off into a cool breeze that felt almost like autumn. It seems it will arrive early this year. The air had that rinsed quality, that faint promise of change. Eva’s joy is never subtle. She galloped ahead, then doubled back, as if the morning belonged solely to her, and she was willing to share it with me.

When we returned, The One was still asleep, cocooned in the soft cave of our bed. There was a certain deep comfort about that — the house hushed, the blinds drawn, his steady breathing behind the bedroom door. Eva and I settled into our small rituals: coffee for me, news murmuring in the background, her patient wait for breakfast at 7:30 sharp. Even grief makes room for routine.

Later, I drove to the barber. Overdue; I'd been putting off a visit for weeks. The sign on the door insisted they were open. They were not. I stood for a moment in the parking lot, mildly affronted by the universe, then decided to fetch groceries at Atterbury Value Mart while I regrouped.

As it happened, there was a barber there. Open. Brightly lit. Unfussy.

I took a chance.

A very professional Middle Eastern gentleman mowed my face with brisk efficiency. Grey fell away in soft drifts. He shaped and trimmed and tidied until the mirror offered back a man who looked, if not younger, then at least more deliberate. When I paid, he asked for my pension card.

I laughed. Properly laughed.

Back home, The One and I ate our customary supermarket pies in companionable near-silence, saving the flaky droppings for Poppet, who stationed herself beneath us like a hopeful altar. We washed the pasties down with cheap cola. There was something teenage about it. Uncomplicated. Slightly ridiculous.

He unpacked the groceries with his usual diligence. I retreated to my desk. Among the shopping was the meds to ease his aches. When he found them, there it was.

Not a grin. Not even a full smile.

A flicker.

The faintest upward shift at the corner of his mouth. A softening in his eyes. Relief, small but undeniable.

And in that moment, it settled in me.

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no swelling music. Just a quiet internal exhale. A sense that, even in this altered landscape, even in the long corridor of after, we are still capable of easing one another’s burdens.

That flicker was the first glimmer I have consciously named. It passed almost at once. But I saw it.

And sometimes, noticing the light is its own inheritance.

Written by I

the shape of a giggle

2026-02-24T20:43:00.004+02:00

After a brief hiatus, I resumed scheduled reading sessions a couple of weeks ago. Grief has a way of scattering time. The days since my mom passed on have felt both heavy and oddly elastic. Whole afternoons dissolve without warning. Evenings stretch. Sleep comes when it feels like it, and sometimes not at all.

So I decided to impose a little order on things.

I moved my dedicated reading time from just before bedtime to around 19:00, after the news finishes and my love’s in the shower. It felt practical. It also felt faintly ceremonial. Reading is no longer the last act of the day, but something that anchors the evening, like switching on a lamp in a dim room.

I also moved the location. Instead of lounging on the bed, I now sit at my desk. Here, I can stream music continuously and have access to the web on a proper big screen, should I happen to read something that my inquisitive mind wants to know more about, which happens more often than I care to admit. There’s something reassuring about being upright, properly seated, facing the world rather than sinking into it. A straight-backed chair encourages a certain discipline.

Eva, of course, has opinions about all this. She believes structured time is merely a suggestion. She usually parks herself nearby, head resting on her paws, occasionally releasing a long, theatrical sigh, as if she’s enduring something personally. Now and then, she glances up at me with that steady Labrador gaze, quietly verifying that whatever I’m doing with the glowing rectangle is not more important than her existence. I reassure her with a foot against her flank. She accepts this as a temporary compromise.

I’ve progressed deep into Book Two of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. There’s nothing quite like being transported to a parallel Tokyo where two moons hang in the sky, and strange little people emerge from the mouths of goats. It makes the chaos outside the window feel, if not smaller, then at least differently proportioned. The news recedes. The room narrows. Another world opens, calm and faintly ominous.

Sometimes, it doesn’t feel entirely impossible.

The other night, I couldn’t help but smile when I read the following paragraphs, paraphrased for the sake of brevity:

Ushikawa was a short man, probably in his mid-forties. His trunk had already filled out so that it had lost all signs of a waist, and excess flesh was gathering at his throat. But Tengo could not be sure of his age. Owing to the uncommonness of his appearance, the clues necessary for guessing his age were difficult to find. He could have been anywhere between, say, thirty-two and fifty-six.

His spine was strangely curved. The large crown of his head formed an abnormally flat, hairless area with lopsided edges. It was reminiscent of a temporary heliport, made by cutting away the peak of a small hill. Tengo had seen such a heliport in a Vietnam War documentary.

Around the borders of the bald spot clung thick, curly, black hair that had been allowed to grow too long, hanging down shaggily over the man's ears. Ninety-eight people out of a hundred would likely be reminded by it of pubic hair. Tengo had no idea what the other two would think.

The more I read, the wider my grin became. There is something precise about Murakami’s cruelty. It is observational, almost clinical, and yet delivered with a perfectly straight face. The image of a heliport carved into a human skull is so oddly specific that you can’t help but see it. I found myself pausing, rereading the sentences, admiring the calm audacity of it.

And then:

Everything about the man - his face, his body - seemed to have been formed asymmetrically. This imbalance, obvious to any observer, could not help but annoy those in his presence and cause them the same kind of unease they would feel in front of a funhouse mirror.

His suit had countless small wrinkles, which made it look like an expanse of earth that had been ground down by a glacier. One flap of his white dress shirt's collar was sticking out, and the knot of his tie was contorted, as if it had twisted itself from the sheer discomfort of having to exist in that place. The suit, the shirt, and the tie were all slightly wrong in size. The pattern on his tie might have been an inept art student's impressionistic rendering of a bowl of tangled, soggy noodles.

Unexpectedly, a small, irreverent giggle escaped from somewhere deep in my gut as I read the following passage. The sound startled me. It seemed to arrive from a part of the house that had been closed for repairs.

Ushikawa smiled, revealing a mouthful of horribly crooked teeth. Like seaside pilings that had been hit by stormy waves, they pointed off in all directions and were befouled in a great many ways. They were surely beyond help from orthodontia, but someone should at least teach him how to brush his teeth properly, Tengo thought.

Chuckling surprised me. It felt foreign, as if it belonged to someone who hadn’t spent the last few weeks sorting through the sorrowful tatters of a life abruptly altered. For a second, I looked over at Eva, half-expecting her to raise an eyebrow. It seemed vaguely disrespectful to be giggling, given that I am still in mourning.

And yet, perhaps that is precisely why it mattered.

Grief does not suspend the rest of life. It does not cancel out absurdity. Somewhere in Tokyo, a fictional man with a heliport for a head is walking around in a badly fitting suit, and I am allowed to find that funny. The two things can coexist: the ache in my chest and the sudden, involuntary laugh. One does not betray the other.

When The One emerged from the shower, hair damp and smelling faintly of floral soap, he asked what I was smiling at. I tried to explain Ushikawa’s head. It didn’t translate particularly well into Afrikaans. Some things live better on the page, where heliports and crooked teeth can exist without apology.

Still, the giggle lingered.

It felt less like defiance and more like proof of life. A small reminder that even now, especially now, something in me remains responsive to the ridiculous and the sharply observed. Perhaps that is its own quiet grace.

Eva eventually nudged my knee with her cold nose, bringing me back to this particular version of the world. One moon overhead. One dog at my feet. One husband in the kitchen making coffee.

And, for a moment, that was enough.

Written by I

love in the time of diarrhoea

2026-02-15T19:18:00.000+02:00

Ever since my previous post, I’ve carried a peculiar kind of guilt. The sort that whispers that perhaps I should be done by now. That the world has moved on, and surely I ought to have followed suit. That I am clinging too tightly to my mother’s absence, as though grief were a garment I refuse to take off.

But the truth is this: it will be a long, long time before I am even remotely okay. I suspect I may leave this earth still missing her. So, for the sake of social lubrication and smoother office corridors, I will do what so many of us learn to do. I will fold the grief smaller. Tuck it into an inside pocket. Present something more palatable to the fluorescent lights.

At work, my devastating loss has already evaporated. There is no gentleness now. No cushioning. Just the steady hum of productivity, as though nothing seismic ever occurred.

Thankfully, Eva intervened - albeit unintentionally.

On Wednesday, our girl — the glossy black comet of our household — developed a sudden and dramatic case of diarrhoea. She yelped every hour to be let out, summoning impressive quantities of gas and liquid onto the lawn with urgent theatricality. Each time she looked up at us with those liquid Labrador eyes, as if to say, I assure you that this is not my preference either.

By Friday morning, our little lounge-studio had been transformed into what can only be described as a biological minefield. My love, bless him, had risen before me and carefully covered each pile of poop and each puddle of puke with wads of toilet paper, sparing me the worst of it. The white flags fluttered in the breeze from the wide-open windows, giving the room the air of a smouldering battleground after a very undignified war.

Work had the usual Friday buzz; I had just poured my fourth cup of coffee by nine when a message from The One arrived: there was blood in Eva’s stool.

Even in its fractured state, my heart found room to crack a little more. Catastrophe is quick to volunteer its services when you're already raw inside. I managed to secure a 17:15 appointment at the vet, while my husband ordered powdered electrolytes from Checkers Sixty60 to tide Poppet over. Modern miracles come in small sachets.

My darling man then spent the day on his knees, scrubbing the carpet until it sparkled. He sent me a cartoon selfie as he left home with the patient, en route to the vet.

In The Simpsons' version of our lives, he looks mildly heroic and faintly ridiculous, yellow-skinned and stoic, with Eva beside him — loyal, tongue lolling, unaware of her role in our emotional subplot. There is something wonderfully absurd about seeing one’s crisis rendered in animation.

When I met them at the animal hospital in Die Wilgers after work, The One looked exhausted. Eva looked subdued. We were quietly hopeful. After all, these diligent doctors had saved her life when she was just a tiny pup. We have history with them. They know our girl.

The vet was brisk and reassuring. After examining her, she ruled out any complications from Poppet’s recent sterilisation. A droplet of blood under the microscope told its own simple story: a gastrointestinal infection. Nothing sinister. Nothing fatal. Just a small rebellion in the gut.

Three injections followed — anti-nausea, vitamin B, antibiotics. Eva bore them with dignified patience.

I settled the bill, which came in just under R2,000, and felt my legs tremble as I tapped my card. Our finances are as fragile as our hearts these days. Still, there are moments when money becomes secondary to the sound of your dog breathing normally again.

By yesterday, Eva was almost entirely back to her exuberant self. Bounding. Sniffing. Lobbying for snacks.

Her recovery carried something else with it, too: it helped lift my love through the seventh anniversary of Dirk’s death. Valentine’s Day will never be simple for him. It carries a different weight now. A shadow that does not recede.

And yet, here we are. A small family of three. Bruised in various ways. Still standing. Still cleaning carpets. Still driving ageing jalopies to animal hospitals. Still loving fiercely.

There is a Buddhist teaching that all existence contains suffering, and that suffering arises from attachment. I understand the logic of it. If we loved less, we would hurt less. If we held lightly, we would grieve lightly.

But I look at Eva’s shining coat in the sun. I look at my love’s tired, kind face. I think of my mother’s hands.

And I know this: I would not choose a life without attachment. I would not choose less love to spare myself pain. The sorrow is proof of the bond. The bond is proof of the love.

So yes, I am still carrying my mother. My love carries Dirk. We carry each other.

And sometimes, in the middle of it all, a Labrador with an upset stomach reminds us that even suffering has its comic relief. Even grief must occasionally step aside for electrolyte sachets and white toilet paper flags on the carpet.

These are the small mercies.

Written by I

Mamy Blue

2026-02-08T20:18:00.001+02:00

Oh Mamy
Oh Mamy Mamy Blue
I need you Mamy Mamy

It has been a month since my mom loosened her grip on this world and slipped quietly into whatever comes next. A month since she left the solid, ordinary gravity here for something colder and more distant. I still can’t quite say it cleanly. My mouth resists the words, as if naming the thing might lock it in forever.

This morning hurt more than most.

Eva and I came back from our early walk, the air still cool, the day still pretending to be kind. I made a coffee, sat down at my computer, and let sad old songs take over. The kind that know exactly where to press. Eva must have felt the shift. She padded over and rested her head on my feet, heavy and warm, as if anchoring me to the floor.

I keep circling back to the moment it all changed.

It was around three in the afternoon, my first day back at work after the December break. A message came through from my love: I had to come home immediately. There was bad news. He couldn’t say it over the phone. My chest tightened before my mind caught up.

Just as I had done years ago, after he phoned me when he found Dirk, I rushed home. The same sick acceleration. The same terrible knowing without knowing. Someone had died. I just didn’t know who.

I ran upstairs and met him in the passage. The words tumbled out of me before I could stop them.

“Who’s died?”

When he said it was my mom, my hands flew to my mouth. I kept saying no. Over and over. No no no no no. As if repetition could rewind time. As if refusal could still save her.

Oh Mamy
Oh Mamy, you never miss the water ’til the well run dry

Now she is the first thing I think of when I wake up. The thought lands fresh every morning, sharp and unbelievable. I have to convince myself again that it’s real. That she is really gone. That this is not some long, elaborate mistake.

Even with my heart cracking open all over again today, the world refused to pause. I wiped my eyes. I washed my face. I fed Eva outside. I got dressed. I woke my husband. I went out to run a couple of small errands, wearing the bravest version of myself I could manage. It felt thin. It felt borrowed.

Later, back home, I tried to nap, but the bedroom was stifling. The heat pressed down, relentless. I gave up and sank into a small, miserable cocoon of scrolling, killing time until dinner, letting the hours blur and rot quietly.

Oh Mamy
Oh Mamy, I need your shoulders ever bent in prayer
Oh Mamy
Oh Mamy, if only you could hear my voice cry

Mamy Blue, Pop Tops (1971)

I don’t know how this ends. Right now, the future looks flat and airless, stripped of colour. I keep wondering if this grief will ever loosen its grip, or if this is simply the shape my life has taken now. All I know is that I miss my mom in ways that feel unbearable, and I am so very tired of learning how to live without her.

Written by I

always something there to remind me

2026-02-04T20:53:00.002+02:00

Some songs never loosen their grip. They wait quietly, then surface at the smallest provocation, insisting on being felt again. Even when you think you’re ready.

Over the weekend, while clipping my nails, it struck me that this was only the second time I’d done so since my mom died. The first was on the morning of her memorial service. I remember the carefulness of it at the time, as if even something so ordinary needed to be handled with reverence.

Since then, doom scrolling has become my default state. Hours slip past without resistance. It’s like being inside a sitcom where nothing truly serious exists, where consequences are suspended, and pain politely waits off-screen. It’s numbing. And sometimes that feels like mercy.

With the Venice Carnival approaching, the Floating City has begun appearing more frequently in my timelines. Sunlit canals. Masks. Gondolas drifting as if nothing had ever gone wrong there. Each video feels like a small, precise incision.

It must have been around 1983 when my adventurous parents embarked on their whirlwind European tour. They were young, curious, and still gathering stories they would later pass down to us like heirlooms. One of their stops was a two-day stay in La Serenissima, Most Serene Venice.

They were, of course, awed by the grandeur: Piazza San Marco stretching wide and confident, the Doge’s Palace heavy with history, the Rialto Bridge arching patiently over centuries of footsteps, St Mark’s Basilica glowing with borrowed light.

On Murano, amid furnaces and glass shaped by breath and fire, my mom bought a small handmade glass snail. It took up permanent residence on her dressing table, catching the light for the rest of her life.

But what she remembered most vividly wasn’t the romance. It was the filth.

She never tired of telling us about the greasy cats that roamed the narrow walkways in loose, menacing collectives, thriving on fish scraps and pigeons, leaving their mess everywhere. She wrinkled her nose when she spoke about raw sewage draining directly into the canals, her voice carrying equal parts horror and disbelief.

Half-joking, but with a tone that suggested she had given the matter serious thought, she said my dad had been under strict instructions to let her drown if she ever fell into the water. There was, in her view, no amount of soap, scrubbing, or absolution that could make her feel clean again. As a precaution, she never set foot on a gondola. Romance, it seemed, had its limits.

Those stories were told often, with each retelling slightly embellished, delivered with theatrical shudders and exaggerated disgust. We laughed. They became part of the family folklore, as fixed and familiar as the glass snail on her dressing table.

Only now do I realise how much of the world I know this way.

At just about fifty-two years old, I’m coming to terms with the fact that I will never experience Venice as my parents did. My version of the City of Masks will always be borrowed, assembled from my mother’s voice and her opinions, her delight and her revulsion. Like so many other places, moments, and understandings in my life, it exists only because she once stood there and later shared it with me.

Oh, how can I forget,
when there is always something there to remind me?

Naked Eyes, Always Something There To Remind Me (1983)

Written by I

on an altered track

2026-01-26T20:52:00.004+02:00

There is a passage in 1Q84 where Haruki Murakami writes about the moment you realise it is not you that has shifted, but the world itself. One day, you wake up, and the familiar track is gone. Another one has taken its place. Your mind still belongs to what was, but everything around you insists on being something else.

That is what my life feels like. As if the world I knew quietly stepped aside when my mom passed away on 7 January, and a parallel version slid in without asking.

In evidence, there have been a number of recent changes in my life. Some deliberate. Some not.

Every morning now, Eva and I go for a walk. We started during my leave and simply never stopped. On weekdays, I get up ten minutes earlier and arrive at work ten minutes later than I used to. Traffic is still forgiving at that hour. My presence or absence in perdition seems to register very little anyway, so no one notices if I drift in a few minutes after six.

Our walks are brisk. Purposeful. They wake my body and clear my head, at least enough to face the day. Eva moves through the world with uncomplicated joy, nose to the ground, tail certain of itself. I borrow some of that certainty when I can.

Barely a month after Christmas, the holidays already feel like a story from another lifetime. The colour drained from everything so suddenly after my mom died. One moment, the world was loud and bright; the next, it was muted, as if someone had turned the saturation down without warning.

I am drinking less, too. That change started before all of this, somewhere last year, when I grew tired of wasted Saturdays and hungover Sundays that vanished in a blur. These days, I can make a whole weekend last on a single six‑pack. It is not an act of discipline so much as a quiet disinterest.

Other, smaller shifts have appeared. New habits. Slight adjustments. They sit alongside the devastation of losing my mom, not because they soften it, but because life seems determined to keep moving regardless.

I am fairly certain I know what her advice would be if I could ask her. I wrote about it before, when I called her the bravest woman I know. She would not have indulged despair for long. She would have acknowledged the pain, then reminded me to stand up straight and meet the day.

I think of her so often, especially in moments that feel unreal. When the world looks familiar but behaves differently. When my heart insists on breaking quietly, in private, while the hours continue to pass as if nothing has happened.

One of her favourites was Freddie Mercury. His words return to me uninvited, but perfectly timed:

The show must go on
Inside my heart is breaking
My makeup may be flaking
But my smile still stays on

I suppose that is what this season is asking of us. Of The One. Of me. Of all of us left standing on this altered track.

Not because we are ready. Not because it feels right.

But because the world, deranged or not, refuses to wait.

Written by I