MY ILLUSTRIOUS ALTHLETIC CAREER On the top of my bookcase, is a little silver figure of a woman running. This trophy, entitled Grootmeester Padhardloop 1997 dates back to the time when, I was living in George and in an effort to get fit and lose some weight, I joined the outfit called Run/Walk for Life. Three times a week we would gather on a school sports field and either run or walk around it, monitoring our speed and our heart rate at each circuit. This doesn’t sound very exciting and it wasn’t, not at first, but when we had attended the requisite number of sessions and completed the requisite number of circuits, we graduated onto the road and this was much more interesting. We used various routes, most of them along shady avenues in pleasant leafy suburbs. Walking alongside someone for five or six kilometres gives plenty of time for conversation and I came to know all the others in our group and made many good friends. From being a dreaded chore, the exercise session became something to look forward to. Our enthusiastic leader, once a Comrades runner himself, encouraged us to enter road races. Most fun runs are open to walkers as well as runners, and some longer events have categories for walkers, who usually have to start after the runners, so as not to get in their way. When I started entering as a walker, I found that walkers were not always welcome, because they were slower and made the event go on too long, but when a Marathon and a half-Marathon are run at the same time, the organisers don’t mind having walkers in the half-marathon, because water points have to be kept going until all the Marathon runners are home anyway. The first half-marathon I entered was exhausting. I thought I would never finish, but after a while I learnt to pace myself and once I had mastered the technique of the race-walkers wiggle, 21 km became, if not exactly a breeze, much easier. After doing a few of these, we walkers began to set our sights on the 37km Big Walk. In the end I was to do this race three times. But what about the trophy? Well, it came about, that a few of us had entered the Saasveld Half- Marathon. This was a rather tough race, but with a delightfully scenic course, through fields, plantations and indigenous forest. When I entered I didn’t know that it wasn’t just another road race, but the Southern Cape Road Running Championship. For Road Running, the age categories are: Junior, Senior, Master and Grandmaster. (Grand master in those days was sixty and over). The winner in each category would be that year’s champ. Our running vests were marked with the appropriate letter. At the start I noticed that there were only two other G’s in the line-up. For most of the race they were both so far ahead that I couldn’t see them. I slogged on at the rear, enjoying the balmy Spring weather, the gurgle of the mountain streams, and the sweet scent of the pine trees along the route. I passed one of the Gs a little way after the half-way mark. Having set out too fast, she was now sitting by the side of the road puffing and panting and suffering from cramping in the calves. I made a perfunctory inquiry as to whether she needed assistance, but she grimly waved me on. About two kilometres before the finish, I came across the other Grandmaster lady, another Walk-for-lifer, and a faster walker than I was. She had found a clump of edible mushrooms by the side of the road and was picking them and stuffing them in her small backpack. “You go on ahead,” she told me. “I don’t mind being second for once.” She was a bit taken aback when she discovered that I was to be crowned Southern Cape Lady Grandmaster Half-marathon Champion, but took it with good grace. I think she won the next year, but after that, the age for Grandmaster was dropped to fifty-five and the competition was much too tough for either of us. Now that my walking is reduced to a slow perambulation round the park, I have the trophy displayed prominently in my sitting-room to impress visitors. I don’t tell them that there were only three of us in the race and that one dropped out and the other stopped to pick mushrooms.

Choosing a Writing Project
I haven't ben using this blog for quite a while. I have been trying to finish the story I started more than a year ago.  I seem to have finally resolved the problems and sorted out a satisfactory ending. Satisfactory, did I say. No, not entirely satisfactory, but good enough to complete the exercise. That is what this piece of writing has been, an exercise, a learning process.  I have written several short stories some of them have even been published.(in litnet and Itch) but anything longer has been much more difficult for me. I started a crime novel, but had to abandon it.  Then when I was attending Paul Mason's group he gave us a "tryptich" of stories to read and suggested we try to produce something similar. (If I remember there were three stories linked by one particular character. The first described an incident in this character's childhood and was written in his voice. The second, an incident in his youth narrated by the same character's wife and the third, a later incident related by the character's daughter. The stories put together were about as long as a short novel.  I chose the theme of Betrayal. I set the first in the seventies in the central character's early adolescence.(verkrampt childhood)  The second would be narrated by a friend and comrade at university and would be set in the eighties (student unrest) and the third narrated by a lover. (struggle)
I never got beyond the first story, which could possibly have stood on its own.Although I was pleased with the beginning, I was less pleased with the ending which was very weak and definitely needed re-writing, but I couldn't think how to improve it.  I abandoned it also.  I did finish a short novel for children. I was fairly satisfied with it, but it got lost when I acquired a new computer. Somehow it hadn't been properly backed up. Now recent technology has caused it to be out of date.  I still have fragments and might reconstruct it.  A fourth story which had a promising beginning was about a teenager with an alcoholic parent. (I had become aware of the fact that publishers like 'Youth Literature' to be full of misery and angst.) This also did not get beyond Chapter 3. 

Perhaps I may return to one or other of these, when I finish the present project, encouraged by the knowledge that I am actually able to  complete a piece of writing longer than 2000 words.
On the other hand I might do as my daughters suggest and write some more chapters of my Memoir. At least I will be sure of an audience even if the readership is confined to my family.
  

Reading my previous posts, I realise that they could all do with more vigorous editing.  Typos and spelling errors abound. My mid-year resolution:  Edit twice at least before posting. 

The Poetry Festival at McGregor

As a taste of the delights that were on offer, here are some of my favourites from the pens of the participating poets. (short ones to save my typing fingers)

Green House
by Finuala Dowling

I live in a large green house
with my daughter and three dogs.
Also here you my find sister,
certainly brother,
and mother(grand).

No husbaand
and no cat.

People sometimes ask about the cat.

Bus shelter
by Graham Dukas

Standing on the cusp
between walkway and roadway

Prisoner of the waiting moment
a pausing between here

and somewhere else
I am the face of commerce;

Colgate toothpaste, to be exact,
which has me smiling

across the breadth of my bench
and when you are here

shaded from the sun
or kept dry from the rain

mylips hover above your neck
and you have no idea

that when you leave
on the eight-forty-five for town

my smile will be for the memory
of our moment together.

On realising I am in love with you
by Kerry Hamerton

I wanted a man with a tall stride and
berry brown legs.
An adventurer

A long-haired surfer with an earing
and a six-pack
A self-made man.

A millionaire. A bespectacled genius.
I'm sure my ad said ;
'must love dogs'

And I got you.

Evening Stables
by Helen Moffett  (always makes me nostalgic for the time when my children were young, and had ponies)

As dusk settled down, so did the horses
and for a spell, life would hang in
perfect balance; gleam of liquid eyes,
 noses nudging in troughs; one of the
bolder cats trowling from his perch
on a broad back; outside.
the resident owls warming up
for half and hour's counterpoint
of notes soft and deep
as the darkness catching the trees;
inside warmth rising like bread
from my pony's sturdy frame
as I'd lean against his barrel girth;
the toasty smell of oats and molasses
all underpinned by the steady rhythm
of chomping; more soothing, consoling
than any lullaby
perfect balance     

Mute
by Shaun Kirk
My pen taps restlessly against tes desk
like water dripping into a basin
thoughts spill an wash
out into an ebbing sea
where they dance in the tide
until theare marooned on empty beaches
I try in vain to pry them from settlement,
torend them into use.
I tug an pull at unbending cords,
burn the skin from my palms,
but they will not yeild to me.
My mortality becomes apparent
as the dust settles around me,
unspoken words dissolve and vanish.

What life is really like
by Beverley Rycroft

You need to toughen up
my father would complain
when I was small.
I ought to take you to see
chickens having their heads
chopped off.
that would teach you
what life is really like

He'd seek me out
when one of his pigeons
crazed for home or
mad with terror from a
roaming hawk
would tumble into the loft
mutilated by
wire or beak.

I was the one made to
clench my palms round
its pumping chest,
to keep it still while
my father's hairy fingers stitched
it's garotted throat
angily to rights again.

You see life is a fight for survival
he'd shout, forgetting
he was not lecturing his students
or giving his inaugural address
You gotta roll with the punches.

I waited and waited for that bitter
roughness to spy me  and circle
in to land
        years and years
of flinching anticipation until
the day I came home from hospital

and my father dressed my wound.

Easing with practised hands
the drip from my bulldozed chest
he renewed the plater in breathing silence
never speaking never
once saying

Life's a bastard
Toughen up

Tin roof
by Kelwyn Sole

Autumn works away like a carpenter
dismantling the promises of spring

our shelters brought so slowly down
it's hard to recollect when each wall

fell, foretell when each corrupt plank
will crumble .  Too lush a green

is the colour that warps away
from the grass to leave a yellow

dull as urine from a spiteful god,
but a reference we are used to.

To go on liveing here, requires a house,
a cat, and an expectation at least

about a future where the eggs
can poach, the cat heave its body

with a thump through the small door
that human hands have sawn for it;

requires a house, preferably of stone,
squatting its grey toad weight on the land

and refusing to budge for anyone

Such houses are no longer built
.......

The Poetry Festival at McGregor

I have just got back from a wonderful weekend at McGregor. This tiny village has managed to host a
most successful festival.  I was most impressed with the organisation and the line-up of interesting events. My only gripe was

that there were so many that it was almost impossible to chose and sometimes the ones I would have particularly like to attend were in the same time-slot on the programme.  But otherwise everything was great. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming,--  the people at the"tuishuis" who were always ready to help, my audiences, who were the best audiences ever, the poets themselves who shared their words and thoughts so generously,  Billy and all the other people at Temenos, and last but not least, my charming and delightful hosts who were kind enough  to share their home with me for the weekend.

I took some pictures while I was there.

Spring may be the best time to view flowers, but there are flowers all year round in the fynbos. I have been trying to make a photographic record of the flowers we see on our weekly "Fynbos Rambles". 
last week and the week before we were at Silvermine.  Here are some of the special flowers we saw:
From top
Erica physoides, Stilbe, Erica urnavirida, Galdiolus maculata.

 



MUIZENBERG

If I could paint; if I had been given the gift
of taking images that fall on rods and cones
and with brush and pigment
transfering them to paper, board or canvas,
I would paint a picture of a mountain

Not Table Mountain,
though everybody wants to pin it down
on a photo or a postcard
and hang it on a wall.
I admit:
 it is nice to look at from the other side of the bay,
 useful as something to show visitors,
and invaluable as a navigational aid,
(without it I wouldn't know my way home)
but no, I wouldn't paint Table Mountain.

The mountain I would paint
is this round plum pudding mountain
 that surprises me each morning
with the joyful richness of its colours
as the sun's rays touch
its grey and olive speckled slopes
and its stripy orange cliffs.