Having perhaps unfairly rubbished the zebra
yesterday for being boring and black and white, I want to begin today on a
positive note. On one of our days together Jun and Caiden and I went to the
aquarium in Capetown. It was
Freedom Day and a holiday so the place was full of children milling about in
the half light and pointing and cooing.
Losing Caiden was a distinct possibility so Business Class was pulled
into service early on. Most of the
fish were predictable but one room bewitched me. It had mirror walls and a cylindrical glass tank in the
middle. In the tank was a
langorous jellyfish, its tendrils drifting
irregularly downwards and its texture transparent as a spirit. If you turned away from the primary
jellyfish you met its reflections, just as soothing, on the walls all
around. The calm, the stillness
and the sensitivity of those gentle wisps was uplifting and an example to
me. We’d been stamped on our hands
with permission to return marks and after we left I begged Jun to
wait for me while I revisited my guru jellyfish, and indeed the rest of the day
was infused with his or her peace.
The boys all returned from the Burn
that night and a visit to a
penguin colony was mooted. South
Africans love their little penguins.
I was all for it, but a humiliating and extreme stomach upset intervened
and I thought bugger penguins I just want to go back to Australia, so the
others left me behind. I went to
bed and listened on my I pad to possibly the most nauseating book I have ever come across. It was A Little Princess by Frances
Hodgson Burnett of Secret Garden fame.
I kept hoping it would toughen up.
It didn’t but I did, and when the others came home I ‘d stopped wanting
to go back to Australia.
After all, we were off to Zambia where we were going to stay
in Livingstone on the Zambezi river in a backpacker place called Fawlty
Towers. Finn and Fredi had opted
for the rival establishment Jolly Boys on account of its reputation for
liveliness, which of course we eschewed because of our parental and
grandparental duties. In the
event, both places had their charm.
Fredi and Finn came tumbling in the door of our flat that
night with a view to sleeping on the sofa and catching their cheap but very
early flight to Livingstone next morning.
Our washing machine was working away into the small hours to supply
enough clean clothes for the trip and going kerlunk kerlunk so I took pity on F
and F and invited them into my queen sized bed. “No hanky panky over there” I said thinking how pleasant and
mediaeval it was to be three in a bed, and we all slept until the dawn of our
next journey.
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