Whereby CHRIS BENNETT ends an electrifying month in
LIFE is seldom dull; or so I find. Take the weekend just passed for instance.
As I looked back over the preceding month I remembered shopping for crickets, rose petals and basil leaves, and the kindness of the surgeon who fitted my shining new pace maker. And believe you me, life is now being taken at a shining new pace.
I also had some fairly serious conversations with Harry, the ginger tom and the delightful company of Smiley, the dog.
My family’s house at the lake in Hartbeespoort is a delicious wilderness of indigenous, in fact endemic would be a more accurate word, flora and fauna, although I should perhaps not include Harry and Smiley in the fauna.
I was under, and still am under, a driving ban until the middle of this month for medical reasons and was therefore confined to this earthly paradise. My time was spent largely in the exquisite company of George McCauley Trevelyan and his sparkling account of
Across the road from the family home is a small nature reserve, haven to a little stand of bluegum trees, which are protected because they have been the domain of a colony of fish eagles for longer than anyone can remember. It pays to exercise a little common sense when rooting out alien species.
The lake, an unfortunate body of water if ever there was one, is sorely troubled by the relentless activities and unbridled greed of man.
Sounder and greater minds than most are now dealing with the problem at an international level, for Hartbeespoort is not the only fish in the seas of the world’s pollution. The dawn may soon be visible, both figuratively and literally.
The reserve is also home to the earth’s most preposterous creature, the ostrich. These dinosaur-beaked-and-legged creatures used to roam the plains and valleys of this part of the world in huge numbers. They are interesting to watch. They are the embodiment of the ancient human perception that the grass on the other side of the fence is always greener.
The sturdy, but not unattractive, fence of the reserve allows the birds to put their heads, and therefore their long, sinuous necks through it and munch happily on the greener pastures of the roadside verges, turning their backs on the acres of lush grass in the reserve. The do this in a row, like cattle at a stall. And all this with a brain the size of a pea.
I wondered what the collective noun for ostriches is, or should be. Flight can hardly be the word. Any ideas?
Oh, yes; I nearly forgot.
The crickets are to feed Hermione the bullfrog who, along with about twenty of her relatives, will soon be released into the welcoming wetlands of the lakeside; the rose petals and basil leaves are for my friend Alan’s Bearded Dragon, which lives on a diet of rose petals and basil leaves, which must be a fair equal to drinking champagne and eating caviar whilst listening to Haydn’s quartets; preferably the Amadeus recordings.
There is no place like home, is there?
A boa of ostriches?
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