the one and I

nobody is coming

2026-10-14T19:13:11.601+02:00

You can't choose how you're born, but you can choose how you die.

— Tamaru Kenichi, 1Q84

I wonder if tripping on acid makes the world feel as surreal as mine has become. If so, I imagine the chief difference is that the experience eventually wears off.

Starting last week, I had to get used to driving my love's jalopy to work. Before my first trip, however, we had to get the car a new battery. Again. You can read the story of the previous one, which managed to outlive its warranty by a matter of days, here. A valiant effort, all things considered, but hardly the stuff of automotive legend.

It's as though the gods maintain a schedule of things destined to give up the ghost around month-end. Our savings are looking considerably bleaker for it.

Anyway, I am slowly acclimatising to the Picanto. Save for the seatbelts, it offers precious little in the way of safety features. No airbags, no crumple zones, no reinforced doors, no ABS. And that's before we get to the creature comforts: no turbo, no aircon, no radio, not even a rear-window wiper. Basic doesn't begin to cover it.

Even so, I am profoundly grateful to have a back-up vehicle. The little mite is willing enough, if somewhat less than reassuring in the braking department. Today, we celebrated our first 100 kilometres together. At this rate, we might even get to like each other.

At work, things are venturing further south than they have in a long time. I return home a little more worn away and jaded each day, the accumulated pressure gradually obscuring whatever light might remain.

There is something almost impressive about a place that can make a person feel exhausted before the working day has properly begun. I have written about this often enough over the years, yet the words change little. The machinery grinds on.

Then, as though the universe had decided that the situation needed a little extra absurdity, there was the guy who rammed me, as described last week.

I took a photograph through the windscreen as he nonchalantly continued on his way. My phone, displaying a commendable disregard for evidence, focused on the raindrops instead. The number plate dissolved into a blur. There you have it: a portrait of modern life, in which the details that matter remain frustratingly out of focus while everything else is rendered in exquisite clarity.

If only the taxi had hit me harder.

The thought is an ugly measure of just how thoroughly the pressure has been wearing me down. It is the sort of bitter, passing thought that tells you something is badly wrong with the circumstances in which you find yourself.

And so we arrive at Sunday evening.

I was standing listlessly at the window, watching the world outside and trying to come to terms with the prospect of returning to perdition in the morning. The weekend's brief reprieve was over. Another week waited on the other side of the night, bringing its familiar demands, endless crises and unrelenting pressure.

Then something hit me.

It struck with such force that my eyes filled with tears. For a moment, I could scarcely breathe.

Nobody is coming to save me.

There are no knights in shining armour waiting beyond the horizon. Superman isn't going to swoop down from the sky and carry me away from the wreckage of my life. Gandalf won't appear at the door, staff in hand, to lead me out of the darkness.

No mysterious benefactor will offer me a new life where the bills are paid, the work is meaningful, and the people are kind.

I wish I'd understood this most adult of truths thirty-one years ago, when I was first officially ushered into adulthood. Ah, the anguish it would have spared me! All those years spent waiting for circumstances to change, for somebody to notice how hard things had become, for the world to offer some reprieve from the business of simply getting through it.

Oddly enough, the realisation brought another, less crushing one in its wake. The absence of a rescuer did not necessarily mean the absence of a way forward. It simply meant that the story might not unfold as I had once imagined.

For now, I have my love, and we have Eva, who continues to insist that the day must be faced, regardless of how verklempt her humans might be. Her needs are wonderfully uncomplicated: a walk, a meal, some company, and the occasional opportunity to investigate something that has clearly never been investigated before. She asks nothing of us beyond our presence, and gives us so much in return.

This is no small thing. This is one of the things that keep my life tethered to something recognisable.

And so I get up. I go to work. I come home to The One and our girl. I try to be present for the small, ordinary things that remain good, even when the rest of the world seems to be slowly losing its colour.

It is not a grand plan. It is barely a plan at all.

But this is the life in front of me, in all its maddening, mundane, occasionally beautiful absurdity. And if I couldn't choose how I was born, surely I can choose how I spend the last bit of it.

Written by I

tindhólmur

2026-10-04T20:25:27.936+02:00

Just when it feels safe to step back into the water, something sparks the gods' anger; they immediately respond by unleashing havoc, delivering yet another unhinged and surreal week.

On Monday night, a major thunderstorm brought local flooding and a severe explosion at the electrical substation at Waltloo. Half the city was left without electricity. Over here, the continuing storms and unyielding dark skies rendered the solar backup system more or less obsolete, and we had power for exactly six hours over the following 72.

Work was not spared. We did the best we could, but there is a limit to what two residential-sized petrol generators can accomplish. Keeping a few lights and computers going is one thing; running two commercial digital printers is quite another.

By the end of it, September's sales target had become just another casualty of the prolonged power outage.

On Wednesday afternoon, in the middle of the ensuing chaos on the unilluminated roads, an anonymous minibus taxi came hurtling into me, leaving us a one-car family instantly before disappearing into the pouring gloom.

Sometimes I know why the gods are angry. Most of the time, I haven't the foggiest.

On Friday evening, Google noticed the haggard state I was in and decided that what I really needed was a holiday. Its suggestion? Tindhólmur, a barren islet in the Faroe Islands.

I decided to take a closer look and wandered off on a virtual tour to the far north. Before long, I had reached the conclusion that Tindhólmur is a remarkably accurate representation of what remains of my life after the relentless, abrasive tempests of the past year.

A stark, slowly disintegrating shard sticking out of a stormy sea.

I did not go to bed on Friday night. Instead, I crammed my mind with whatever I could find online, with the single-minded determination of someone trying not to think.

My head was still buzzing when I took Eva for her walk at around 5:30 yesterday morning. It was surprisingly icy outside, and we were both glad to get home; we lazily snuggled into bed next to The One, who lay blissfully aslumber.

The rest of the day passed in a blur of naps, coffee and yet more time online.

This morning, somewhat sobered and considerably more rested, I prepared a symbolic offering to appease the wrathful gods.

By 7:30, a dozen steaming cinnamon-dusted cupcakes were cooling on the kitchen counter.

Let us hope the gods appreciate home-baked goods. There isn't much left of me to erode.

Written by I

strawberry fields forever

2026-09-27T20:06:01.922+02:00

Living is easy with eyes closed,
Misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone,
But it all works out;
It doesn't matter much to me.

There are songs that seem to acquire new meanings as we get older. Words that once floated past unnoticed can, decades later, suddenly land with uncomfortable precision.

That opening verse feels rather close to home at the moment. Sixty years after John Lennon wrote it, I find myself in much the same territory of heavy introspection and personal turmoil — minus the fame, fortunately, and with considerably less interesting hair.

It's been a busy two weeks since I last posted.

At work, silly season has started manifesting early, with increasingly jittery shoppers trying to get their orders in before prices inevitably go up. The usual mixture of deadlines, demands and low-level panic is building, and after so many years in the same industry, I know exactly where this particular road leads.

Last Saturday, I helped an old colleague with a personal job, earning enough cash to see us through to payday. It was useful, necessary work, but it also meant that the weekend disappeared almost before it had begun.

I tried posting on Sunday. I sat staring at a blank draft, waiting for inspiration to descend upon me. Nothing did. I started posts, abandoned them, rummaged through our photographs and dug around in old music, hoping something would shake loose.

Zero.

Meanwhile, my love was under the weather from the beginning of last week, in no small part thanks to someone particularly nasty. By the start of the weekend he was thoroughly worn out, so I gave him space to reset by taking over some of his chores - cooking a pot of stew and doing the washing.

There is a certain absurdity in all this. The world can be falling apart around you, and still, the washing needs to be brought in before the next shower.

In between the stew, the washing and another failed attempt to write something meaningful, I began to understand what had been bothering me.

I have spent a lot of time lately feeling disoriented — pulled in different directions by work, by home, by other people's behaviour and by the general business of trying to make sense of life. And one of the less pleasant discoveries along the way has been that people can be remarkably unkind.

That shouldn't come as a revelation after 52 years on the planet. Still, knowing a thing intellectually and having it land squarely in your lap are two completely different things.

Perhaps that is why I couldn't write.

I was looking for solid ground while caught in the middle of an existential loop.

Then, as I took down the washing this afternoon, the penny finally dropped.

Not every update needs to contain an epiphany. Not every week needs a grand narrative. There is great value in recording the quiet spaces between the milestones — the ordinary days in which nothing much gets resolved, but life carries on regardless.

So, rather than forcing a profound conclusion out of the available material, here is what caught my attention this week:

Listening to: The Beatles.

Thinking about: Who Moved My Cheese?

Grateful for: The One and Eva.

And for now, I'm just going to stand where I am.

Always know, sometimes think it's me.
But you know, I know when it's a dream.
I think a "No," I mean a "Yes,"
But it's all wrong.
That is, I think I disagree.

The Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever

Written by I

kids

2026-09-13T20:28:01.355+02:00

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin

I've had this post in mind for a very long time. Out of respect for my mom, though, I would never have published it while she was still alive.

Now she's gone, and it no longer matters. This particular little circle of life will end with me soon enough. At 52, my own turn of the wheel is, statistically speaking, more than halfway done — and there are no children waiting in the wings to carry on.

At first glance, the poem above seems unnecessarily harsh. I came across it by chance some years ago, and it struck a chord. Beneath the profanity and black humour was something I'd been thinking for years but had never managed to articulate so neatly: the peculiar business of making another human being and sending them off into the future.

I've never felt any great urge to do it.

There is a certain expectation that having children is simply what one does. You grow up, find someone, settle down, reproduce, worry about the mortgage, and eventually become the sort of person who complains about young people today. The wheel turns. The species continues. Everybody gets a part.

I somehow missed that memo.

Every now and then, though, I do feel a sharp pang of regret that we never had any kids. My poor mom never had the chance to be a proper grandmother, other than to the various pets who passed through our lives (and were, naturally, still treated with all the dignity and love due to grandchildren).

Then I think about what having children actually means.

The thought of dispatching my genes into the unknown future makes me uneasy. How do you know that your descendants will still be around in four or five generations? How do you know they will be all right? How do you know what sort of world they will inherit, or what sort of people they will become?

You don't, I suppose.

And that's the part that frightens me.

What if they turn out like Marshal Hitler?

You can love a child, nurture them, teach them everything you know and do your very best by them — and eventually they become a person whose choices are no longer yours to make. Then they have children of their own, and those children have children, and your little contribution to the human experiment becomes increasingly remote.

A couple of cycles down the line, they wouldn't even know I had ever existed, let alone that I once lay awake worrying about their imaginary welfare.

My great-grandmother is a case in point. I barely knew her; I was only six when she died at 94. My memories of her now are largely the memories my mom passed down to me.

Beyond that generation, I know almost nothing about my forebears. Time has made them anonymous: names lost, faces forgotten, lives reduced to fragments of DNA and whatever stories happened to survive.

Yet without them, I wouldn't be here.

It leaves me wondering about the strange chain of events that brought me into being. Did those nameless donors consciously choose to bring another life into the world? Did they wonder what would become of their offspring? Did they feel any sense of responsibility towards someone they would never meet?

Or did biology simply get on with the job?

That, in the end, may be the strangest thing about the whole business. We are here because countless humans before us continued the process, each handing life on to the next without any way of knowing where it would lead.

My parents, pictured below around 1994, were one link in my chain. Their decision — whatever combination of love, instinct, circumstance and biology lay behind it — eventually produced me.

And here I am, several decades later, contemplating the whole magnificent, miserable, mysterious enterprise — deciding that the chain ends here. After all, as Larkin cheerfully suggests, that is one way of making sure the misery isn't handed on.

The wheel turns, generation after generation. I will not give it another push.

Written by I

a day that went nowhere

2026-09-06T18:59:03.198+02:00

I sat down this afternoon with absolutely no idea what to write about. After a while, I decided that, rather than skipping another Sunday, the obvious solution was to report on having nothing to write about.

There has been another sudden change in the weather. Just over a week ago, day temperatures soared to 30°C; starting Spring Day on Tuesday, though, they dropped again with startling efficiency, culminating in a freezing, wet weekend.

Eva's peculiar sense of duty did not stop us from venturing out. She doesn't care about my work, the blog's statistics, whether I've been productive, or whether the world is currently going to hell. There is a walk to be taken. Therefore, there is a walk to be taken.

And when the rain eased at six this morning, off we went.

A foggy drizzle awaited us as we briskly went about our business. The fine mist clung to us from the moment we stepped outside, and within minutes we were approaching the same level of saturation we would have achieved by walking through the earlier downpour.

We fled back home to the electric heater and hot coffee. Not long after seven, Eva had a quick breakfast in the soggy courtyard before we returned upstairs, where the three of us snuggled under the blankets for a cosy snooze.

It had become even colder, and another thunderstorm was brewing when this reporter finally stumbled out of bed around ten. A layer or two of extra clothing was hastily added, and the day was allowed to take its lazy course.

I divided my time between Company of Heroes 3: Final Stand, doomscrolling, and Cities: Skylines II. There was little ambition involved. Grand plans were not made. A great personal transformation did not occur.

And, on reflection, that might be the point.

There is value in letting a day be exactly what it is, rather than constantly demanding that it justify its existence. No revelation is required. No lesson needs to be extracted. A rainy Sunday can just be a rainy Sunday.

Which brings me neatly back to the problem encountered at the beginning of the post: having nothing to write about.

It turns out that nothing much happening is still something to report.

And so, despite the rain, the cold, the excessive screen time and the considerable quantity of sleep, the Sunday evening post has been filed.

Nothing happened. And that was perfectly fine.

Written by I

the drop

2026-08-30T20:42:56.377+02:00

Payday this month started with an auspicious blood moon.

We’ve all felt it — that sudden, glorious shift in the atmosphere. One minute you’re staring at your phone, nursing the last few rands and wondering how toilet paper has once again become a major financial consideration. Then, buzz. The notification drops.

Payday.

Suddenly, all those early mornings, late-night grinds and gridlock on Solomon Mahlangu Drive mean something. It is finally Ola Day.

There is a strange kind of magic in that exact moment when weeks of invisible work transform into something tangible — into meat, toilet paper, petrol and all the other deeply romantic things that keep a household functioning.

My heart gave a little leap when the notification came through.

Unfortunately, because we live in the Middle Ages, there is still a day’s delay between seeing the money and actually having it.

So Friday remained Friday.

And what a Friday it was.

Three colleagues were MIA, leaving those of us who had actually made it to work to carry on as though everything was perfectly normal. With one more working day before August ends, I had already wildly overshot my adjusted sales target — while some of my teammates had barely reached 30% of their considerably lower targets.

But what is there to say?

Let it be.

I made it to 17:00 without a serious incident, which felt like an achievement in itself. And somewhere between the last frantic job of the day and switching off my computer, I found myself thinking about Dolly Parton.

I have borrowed from her working-day anthem before to describe how I feel about my job. It seemed appropriate that the woman who gave the working world one of its great unofficial anthems had left us during another month of clocks, deadlines, traffic and trying to turn pain and suffering into something useful.

By the next morning, there was a small miracle waiting in my bank account.

My weekend started at 4:20am on Saturday, when a slightly confused Eva and I took a very quick walk around the block. She's used to our weekend expeditions beginning after six. At the much earlier hour, the poor girl looked at me as though we'd received evacuation orders from the authorities.

By five, I was in the car, having just left home.

I stopped first for much-needed petrol before setting off to Uitkyk, like I used to do during the strange, quiet days of Covid. There is something deeply satisfying about shopping before the rest of the proletariat has had the opportunity to wake up and get in your way.

The store was enjoyably deserted.

I could mince down the aisles unhurriedly, contemplating the contents of the trolley like a man who had inherited a small fortune rather than someone who had simply been paid for the work he had already done.

The world was transformed by the time I drove home.

The sun was out, bathing everything in sparkling gold.

And then, while The One, Eva and I unpacked the vittles, it struck me.

The blood moon had worked its magic after all.

Twenty-four hours earlier, my salary had existed only as numbers on a screen. Now those numbers had become a month's worth of groceries stacked across the kitchen. Meat in the freezer. Vegetables in the fridge. Toilet paper. Coffee. Things we needed. Things we wanted. Enough to carry us forward for another month.

There is something almost mystical about that transformation.

We spend our days chasing numbers, targets, deadlines and figures that have no weight or smell or texture. Then, on payday, the abstract becomes real. Hours spent in an office become groceries in the back of a car. Frustration becomes petrol. Exhaustion becomes food on the table.

Digital numbers become the practical substance of life.

I spent the morning gaming and napping, stepping out again before noon to collect my weekend pour.

My final stop was at the café down the street to pick up our single monthly allowance of junk food: greasy slap chips and Viennas popping with fat.

Back home, we drenched our depravity in mayonnaise and stuffed ourselves while gulping down sugary cola.

Delectable.

I’ll go back to losing weight tomorrow.

And so payday came and went.

One bright day each month when everything feels possible — when numbers turn into food, the cupboards are full, the car has fuel and the future looks temporarily negotiable.

Then the debit orders arrive.

And, with almost religious devotion, the world returns to normal.

Written by I

here comes the sun

2026-08-23T12:21:50.248+02:00

Here comes the sun
And I say, "It's all right"

Little darlin'
It's been a long, cold, lonely winter
Little darlin'
It feels like years since it's been here

Here comes the sun

— The Beatles, Here Comes The Sun

After the sudden drop in temperatures I wrote about last week, we went from a freezing maximum of only 7°C on Tuesday the 11th to touching 30°C on Thursday the 20th.

Spring lasted about four days.

Welcome to South Africa.

One moment, we were huddling beneath blankets, confined by winter's icy grip. The next, the air was warm again, the windows were open, and summer was standing outside the door, impatiently tapping its foot.

Eva and I can see the change in the light when we go wandering every morning. The sun is rising earlier now, pushing gold and orange across the horizon before either of us has properly woken up. The world looks different. Less closed-in. Less bleak.

The season has turned.

And, without me quite noticing, something else has changed too.

It's suddenly become easier to move around. Easier to bend over and fasten my shoes. Easier to clip my toenails without embarking on a minor expedition. I've also had to start wearing a belt to keep my pants from falling down.

This is no happy accident of nature.

About two months ago, the three of us stepped onto the scale. Eva, naturally, went first. Then The One. Then me.

I was appalled.

I was just short of a metric quintal.

For those who, like me, find the word quintal faintly ridiculous, that is 100 kilograms. A hundred kilos. I was close enough to hear the gravitational pull calling my name.

So I decided to do something about it.

Eva and I continued with our daily walks. Every day. No matter how edgy I felt, or how cold or rainy it was. And somewhere along the way, we started sprinting the last couple of hundred metres home. More accurately, Eva sprints with great enthusiasm while I try not to die.

Exercising would be so much more rewarding if calories screamed while you burned them.

There have been other changes too.

No more milk or creamer in my coffee, apart from the very first cup of the day. Drink more water. Avoid sugar. A brisk walk around the building at work when I can manage to tear myself away from the endless stream of other people's problems.

Nothing dramatic. No miracle diet. No expensive gym membership. No fitness influencer yelling motivational nonsense at me through my phone.

Just walking.

And moving.

And doing the small things often enough for them to add up.

That's the long and short of how I have managed to shed seven kilos.

Fifteen pounds.

About one stone.

Roughly the weight of a six-month-old baby, which means that I have been carrying an infant around with me, without its mother asking any questions.

I could probably do with losing as much again. Still, I am really proud of this small victory. Gods know, there hasn't been much to celebrate lately.

I didn't even set out to change the world. I just kept moving through it, one day at a time. One walk. One small decision. One foot in front of the other. And then, one day, I looked down and discovered that I was no longer quite the same person.

The seasons change. We change with them. Even when life seems to have stopped, we are still moving.

And, after that long, cold, lonely winter—

Here comes the sun.

Written by I

let it be

2026-08-13T21:15:23.488+02:00

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I started feeling blue towards the end of last week, when it looked as though winter was coming to a premature end.

This was particularly unfortunate because winter is my favourite season. I like its cold, its cloudless skies, its long evenings and the general sense that the world has slowed down and pulled a blanket over its head. I was not ready to see it go.

Then, on Monday, hell froze over.

Icy rain and gale-force winds battered anyone foolish enough to wander outside. Eva and I made it a very short distance down the road, just far enough for her to hurriedly take care of business before beating a hasty retreat back to our cosy nest.

I took the photo above from our bedroom window that night, when the storm was at its fiercest. It was actually taken in colour, but the world outside was so bleak that it might as well have been black and white.

The long weekend did not turn out to be nearly as restorative as I had hoped. Last week's post had left me looking forward to a little peace and quiet, but for some reason the tension simply would not let go. My love and I spent far too much of the weekend at one another's throats, and I started wishing that I could simply escape to perdition.

When the time came to go back on Tuesday, though, it was hard to accept that I actually had no choice. After a stormy, restless night, icy rain was still pouring when I set off at 5:45.

I allowed myself a hot coffee before opening my inbox.

Thirty-one unattended e-mails.

Great start to the week.

That well-known epidemic of random sick days has taken hold of my colleagues again, with someone else succumbing every day. The place is beginning to resemble a car running on three cylinders, rattling gamely down the road while everyone pretends not to notice that one of the pistons has permanently gone missing.

Yesterday, I was called in for a “private meeting” with the 2IC.

I was informed that my sales target had been adjusted — down an inane 4.5% — because they were handing me “other responsibilities”.

16 years of time served has taught me to be sceptical... with good reason, it turned out. The long and the short of it is that I am now formally charged with cleaning up everyone else's messes, management snapping at my heels when I don't do it quickly enough.

I got the first taste of my new role yesterday afternoon.

It was, unsurprisingly, anything but pleasant.

As always, the unbearable stress bruised my spirit, and I retreated into myself when I got home last night. I dug around in golden oldies, wallowing for a while in the mire.

All my sorrow, sad tomorrow
Take me back to my old home
All my crying, feel I'm dying
Take me back to my old home

The world is a bad place
A bad place, a terrible place to live
Oh, but I don't want to die

— The Marmalade, Reflections of My Life

Some of the music seemed to understand the mood better than I did: sorrow, tomorrow, the longing for somewhere else, and that weary sense that the world is not the easiest place to inhabit.

I wasn't convinced about not wanting to die, though. There are times when it feels as though it would be considerably easier to gather oneself to one's forefathers and be done with all this.

But what if that is precisely where I keep getting it wrong?

Perhaps life isn't something that is supposed to be wrestled into submission, or abandoned altogether. Perhaps the good, the bad and the ugly are all part of the same peculiar bargain. The winter sunshine and the freezing rain. The peaceful weekend and the arguments. The warm bed and the 5:45 alarm. Eva's wagging tail and thirty-one unattended e-mails. The occasional glimpse of beauty, followed almost immediately by something that makes you wonder whether the universe has gone back to being cruel.

This particular lesson must be the most difficult to learn: that suffering is made worse when we insist that reality should be something other than what it is.

What if we must simply endure suffering without allowing it to become the whole story?

Which brings me to The Beatles.

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

— The Beatles, Let It Be

This has always struck me as a song about surrendering the struggle to control the uncontrollable. And “Mother Mary” in the song is not a reference to the Virgin Mary, as I once assumed, but to Paul McCartney's mother, Mary, who appeared to him in a dream and offered him those simple words of wisdom: let it be.

There is something wonderfully circular about that.

Rilke tells us to let beauty and terror happen, and to keep going because no feeling is final.

Paul's mother, arriving in a dream decades later, offers much the same advice in fewer words: let it be.

Don't give up. Don't surrender to the darkness. Don't pretend that everything is fine when it plainly isn't.

Just keep going.

Let the storms come. Let the winter linger. Let the bad days be bad days.

And when the universe hands you thirty-one unattended e-mails, well...

Let it be.

Written by I

final stand

2026-08-06T20:53:17.872+02:00

Because it had just been payday, the bank account still looked reasonably healthy. Because it was on a 15% discount plus another 20% for already owning the base game, I treated myself on Saturday to Company of Heroes 3: Final Stand.

It is a standalone roguelite spin on the original game. Instead of pushing relentlessly across Europe, you dig in, build layer upon layer of defences, and try to survive twelve increasingly brutal waves of enemy attacks. Every victory earns a handful of random reinforcements or new abilities, making each attempt a little different from the last. It isn't about conquering territory. It's about holding on for just one more wave.

After a decidedly shaky start, I slowly found my feet. I learned that panicking never helped; that careful preparation mattered more than frantic heroics; that even when the battlefield looked hopelessly lost, there was often just enough left to scrape together one more defence.

Sometimes all you have to do is survive until tomorrow.

The major project I wrote about last week continued to consume almost every waking hour.

There were moments when I genuinely wondered whether I would see the other side of it. I found myself thinking about Mom and Dad again. About Lizz. About Anna. About all those I've loved and lost.

My prayers became wonderfully uncomplicated.

"Please... just let me get through tomorrow."

Tomorrow eventually became today.

This morning the client collected the last of the work for tonight's function, smiled for what felt like the first time in weeks, and casually swiped a platinum card for somewhere north of fifty-five thousand rand.

After all the pressure, all the chasing, all the last-minute changes and impossible deadlines, they even handed me a bag of prime biltong for my troubles.

I briefly considered rejecting the baksheesh on principle. Then I found myself feeling unexpectedly sorry for the unfortunate cow that had already made the ultimate sacrifice. It seemed rather disrespectful to waste the poor thing's final contribution to civilisation.

So I brought it home.

The One approved.

Eva approved even more enthusiastically.

No complaints from that department.

Is this what a victorious final stand feels like?

Not triumph, exactly.

More like discovering that you've somehow managed to stay standing after expecting to collapse weeks ago.

Tonight the words come easily again, no longer throttled by the constant knot of anxiety that has lived in my chest for what feels like forever. The battle is over. Not the war—my workplace has never shown much interest in lasting peace—but at least this particular siege has finally ended.

Monday is a public holiday here in South Africa, and by one of those rare moments of accidental foresight, I'd booked tomorrow off all the way back in January. Four uninterrupted days now stretch ahead of me like unexplored territory.

Perhaps that's the greatest reward of all.

Not the successful project.

Not the unexpected biltong.

Simply the chance to lower the drawbridge, let the smoke clear, and remember that life is supposed to be lived somewhere beyond the walls.

Written by I

...this way comes

2026-07-30T20:53:47.850+02:00

The Highveld is in deep winter—its driest season. The grass has long since surrendered to shades of straw and ash, waiting patiently for a spring that still feels impossibly distant.

Oddly enough, though, winter has not been particularly cold this year. Apart from that one bitter, sub-zero morning during our little escape to Rayton—the same morning that left the veld covered in delicate flowers of ice—the nights have been strangely forgiving. Nature, it seems, has chosen dryness over cruelty.

Lately I've been wondering whether people can do the same.

I haven't posted in more than a week because I've simply been drained. Not the satisfying weariness that follows honest work, but the kind that settles into your bones and quietly hollows you out. I feel as brittle as the dead grass outside; every day another little piece seems to bleach beneath an unforgiving sun. By the time evening arrives, there is scarcely enough of me left to string together a handful of coherent thoughts.

Work continues to be exactly what it has been for far too long.

This week I was handed one of the biggest projects I've ever had to see through, marked urgent, with impossible deadlines and, naturally, no assistance whatsoever. As I write this, I'm still somewhere in the eye of that particular storm. Perhaps it will all come together. Perhaps it won't. Right now, I honestly don't know.

But work isn't the only shadow lengthening across our lives.

The One and I have both started recognising the unsettling truth behind one of EIIR's observations in The Crown:

That's the thing about unhappiness— all it takes is for something worse to come along, and you realise it was actually happiness after all.

It's a cruel thought, but recently it has felt uncomfortably accurate.

The darkness I wrote about last week hasn't lifted. If anything, it has become quieter, more patient. It lingers at the edges of ordinary days, waiting for moments when we're too tired to keep it at bay. Even Eva, our sweet Poppet, with her steadfast insistence that mornings must begin with a walk and that life simply must continue, can only hold it back for so long. We keep putting one foot in front of the other because she asks us to.

Most days, that's reason enough.

So, after my shower each evening, I collapse into my chair and disappear into documentaries about the Weimar Republic and German politics between the two world wars. Strange comfort, perhaps. Yet there is something oddly absorbing about watching history stumble towards catastrophe, seeing ordinary people fail to recognise the shape of disaster until it has already arrived. It demands enough attention that, for a little while, it quietens the noise inside my own head.

Is that all any of us are ever searching for? Not happiness, not even peace, but a brief reprieve from ourselves?

I'm hoping August will bring one.

For now, though, winter still has a firm grip on the Highveld—and on us.

Written by 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