Eyes down for a full tummy…

CHRIS BENNETT has been the object of ground zero observation.

DURING a routine visit to a Pretoria hospital I have been staying with family at the much-maligned Hartbeespoort Dam, a few kilometres to the west of the capital. I know the place well; I lived here for 27 years.

Just across a narrow lane from my friend’s garden is a beautiful wildlife sanctuary. The signature sound in my friend’s garden is the cry of the fish eagle.

The garden is an oasis of plants indigenous to that spectacular and seemingly timeless range of mountains, the Magaliesberg. My friend, a geologist and botanist, owns a wholesale indigenous nursery on the northern, frost-free slopes of the range that takes its elegant Afrikaans name from that of the great leader of the baTswana people of the 19^th century, Mohale.

My friends’ garden (his wife has green fingers and wellies to match) at their home on the lakeside is a living advertisement for the nursery; testimony to the huge range of beautiful flowers, shrubs and trees native to that parched swathe of South Africa which survive happily without water from man’s interfering hand.

The knowledge of the immense blessing of such flora has spread, and more and more people building houses, and indeed housing complexes in the area, have turned to him to design and plant gardens that are at once stunningly attractive, vibrantly interesting and drought resistant. The delightful and celebrated artist Norman Catherine is one of my friend’s many seekers after this philosophical dreamscape.

This practical and calming approach to conserving our precious water is an example to all of South Africa – including those with homes in less salubrious surrounds.

But what has occupied much of my time while I wait for some wondrous being to make a pacemaker especially for me (for we are in love with me, my heart and I) has been sitting on my friends’ stoep watching the ostriches on the other side of the game fence. The more one looks at ostriches, the more ridiculous they become. Wouldn’t the late Alexander McQueen have loved those eyelashes, huge and voluptuous, like the fans of potentates’ concubines?

They strut, and with legs like that you can strut as nothing has ever before strutted, their huge, bulbous bodies all a-bustle with ill-kempt and dishevelled feathers; feathers the size of small bedcovers, a use which some early bright spark probably discovered.

Those legs, of course, are pure dinosaur. Evidence not-so-recently released tells us that the birds are very likely living descendents of those bizarre creatures which dominated life on earth for 64 million years. Not a bad tenure, considering we have been here for only a few seconds in comparison.

They graze, ostriches; they scratch about with their quacky bills, demurely fluttering those preposterous eyelashes, like Lillian Gish coming out of a swoon. They peck, pick and sometimes choose their way through the rich grasses of the summer veld, their flat and ancient heads millimetres from the ground, but with one advantage over the other game.

Near where my friend lives the ostriches are not anxious about whether the grass on the other side of the game fence is greener or not; they poke their tiny heads and scrawny, long and winding necks through the littlest of holes and find out. Maybe they feel protected from the predators (not that there any in the reserve, but even with ostriches, it is the thought that counts) by having their heads safely on the other side of the fence.

To be surrounded as I am by nature in its primitive and majestic glory, be it the plants of eons or feathered dinosaurs, is a privilege in the proper sense of the word and one that gives red blood to my sense of gratitude.