Camel cotch and baboon besties

Yesterday, while gazing at the fridge hoping that some amazing concoction would appear for lunch, (I don't particularly like food at the best of times) I remembered the lunches of my childhood. The sandwich, white bread of course, soaked through with syrup and peanut butter in a crystalized mess, the jams and marmalades, the occasional egg and mayo creation and my favourite, the Jaffle. Made with a leftover meal from the night before between two slices of bread, lightly toasted over an open fire in a jaffle iron. Yummy. My sister's jaffle of choice was mashed potato and tomato sauce. But mine was meat and vegetables with just a hint of gravy. Not enough to make things gooey, but enough to flavour the meal. When our family changed from an open fire cooking system to an electric one, the jaffle was retired, much to our disgust. Other school children had more exotic lunches and some had no lunch at all depending on their family's financial situation. The more affluent amongst us had store bought sandwich spread, also known as 'Camel Cotch'. Pickled vegetables diced in a spicy mayonnaise sauce. My mouth drooled at this decadence and I dreamed that one day I too could have camel cotch on my lunches. But as I have grown older it's not the camel cotch that appeals to me, but perhaps a jaffle made by my grandmother's hand. Grandma was a dab hand at baking and strange to say, I don't remember our lunches having biscuits or cookies wrapped in wax wrap in my stored memories. Did we polish off the cookies before they could make an appearance in school lunch bags? Maybe. There was sometimes fruit from our trees at home. Bananas that would be forgotten and changed into science experiments in our suitcases. Actually fruit was something we could pluck off trees on our walk to and from school each day. Martingulu plums were a constant, (Carissa macrocarpa to give it its real name, although we called it by the Venda equivalent of Umartingulu). For many years I thought it was the Latin name, but I was mistaken. Oh and then there were the mulberry trees, mangoes, litchi, guavas, oh you name it we ate it. One day my aunt and uncle from the city arrived with their three children for a serious family meeting (we weren't told what it was, just that we needed to keep the cousins amused). We took them to our special martingulu bush and plied them with fruit. But my aunt thought we were feeding her children something poisonous and yelled and screamed at us for what seemed like hours when they told her what we had been doing. Aah, but they all survived and so did we. And we learned an important lesson, city kids should not be given food from strange bushes and definitely not given chameleons to play with. It freaked them out when the eyes turned in different directions. I'm sure they all grew out of their fear of cute critters and African fruit, but at the time it was a bit of drama to keep us amused.

Let me tell the saga of Jack the Baboon employed by the South African Railways. Now, my grandfather was a SAR man and he heard this story and at first he was sceptical, but it was all true. It started with a thirty year old man who was employed as a signalman in Uitenhage, South Africa. James Edwin Wide sat in a small hut alongside the railway line and when a train approached, it was his job to manually change the train onto the correct line. James grew bored. He had arrived in Africa with dreams of making a gold find. He lived and married in Cheshire, England and heard stories of gold lying on the surface. To a young man in cold England, he thought this might be the ticket to his dreams. His father was a farm labourer and James was destined for a similar fate. So, he packed up his new wife and baby and bought a ticket to freedom and riches unimagined. But dreams are not always achievable and gold was hard to find. James found himself unemployed with a pregnant wife and small child and he applied for a job he thought would be easy. But easy is often also boring. I presume that he was ADHD or similar because he loved doing crazy things for fun. James took to jumping between moving rail carriages to fuel his adrenaline needs and one day he slipped, cutting off both his legs in a horrible moment of utter agony. Not too perturbed by this turn of events, he assured the SAR that he could still do the job with the help of a wheelchair. But, a pregnant wife and young baby, meant that James would need to push himself along over rocky ground. He happened to see someone selling a semi-tamed baboon. "Aah" he thought "I can teach him to push my wheelchair." James bought the baboon and trained him to be his assistant. Jack was good at his job and happily bonded with his human soul mate. It soon came to the attention of the railway bosses and they decided to pay Jack for his work. 20 Pence a day with a pint of beer at the end of each week. Jack performed his duties faultlessly for nine years. Rain or shine, he never made a mistake. James had fashioned two wooden legs and was now able to walk as if on stilts without the aid of the wheelchair, so this suited them both. I can just imagine James and Jack sitting with their beverages at the end of a boring week, leaning back and smiling at each other for a job well done. Jack served from 1881 to 1890 and the baboon's skull is preserved in the museum in the town. James lived on until 1921 leaving behind six children and his widow, Mary Susan Tucker. Mary died the following year.

I have started aquajogging once more. For almost two years my poor body has been struggling to work around pain and inflammation. The local city pools offer a heated section and I take full advantage of the cheap prices and warm water. But at the pools are many different characters. There are the three old men who are recovering from heart attacks and told to exercise by their doctors. There are the disabled who arrive with carers that help them into the water and guide them through a set of movements. There is the young man with Tourettes who swears at the top of his lungs and twitches constantly. And then there are moms with babies and older ladies looking for company. A bit like me, except I am happy with being solitary. I do my twenty laps of aquajogging in the deep end. I am out of my depth, just as I like it and it keeps the majority of other pool users at a distance. But this week I was doing my workout and overheard a man sprouting about colonialism and the current government to an elderly lady. Yes, older than me. Don't get cheeky, I'm not that old yet.  This old lady is in her 90's and deaf as a doorpost. But the young man was oblivious and happy to find a (deaf) listening ear. She was too well mannered to tell him to buzz off. When he finally realised that she was not really a good candidate for his opinions, he left and she turned to me and started asking who and what and where. I had been silly and stopped doing push ups right next to her. Anyhow, she was born in Zimbabwe and lived for much of her life in Cape Town, so we did have things in common. But having a conversation in a pool with a swearing, jittering man, a pontificating anti-government chap now talking to someone else, loudly, and various other people chatting, even my hearing was taking a battering and how she could discern my answers was a surprise. Maybe she is not as deaf as she had pretended to be with the other gentleman? Oh she is clever. Perhaps I should adopt her modus operandi? "Huh? Sorry, I can't hear you." or when he says something I don't want to answer, I could say "Oh yes, I do drive a green car." And let him do the "Huh?" 

Today I am drilling holes in an old laundry basket that I will use to plant out some iris bulbs, then I will spend a few hours fighting with the internet trying to find somewhere I can upload my paintings to, to be made into jigsaw puzzles or greeting card or maybe even calendars. After all, Christmas is just around the bend.