something like this….

leery

according to studies (somewhere or other) women look at men just as much as men look at women. the difference is that women are meant to be be able to read facial expression and voice tones better than men are. as a result they are able to be more discreet….

On understanding women!

baby, i’ve got a toothpick just for you….

it must be difficult being a man, what with having to wear long pants in 35 degrees and suits and ties to formal events, always understanding maps, but never understanding women. there are a lot of things that must confuse men, for example, today i googled fishing boats, being the subject of one of my exhibitions. lo and behold there had to be at least one fishing boat with a naked woman. now if i were a man i’d be completely confused – how does the naked woman correlate to the boat? how does the boat connect to the woman? fortunately as a heterosexual woman i know to focus on the boat. i think anyway.

this of course happens regularly in my browsing of images. whatever i look for there is always at least one image per page with a semi-clad or seductive or completely naked woman with the subject searched for. i’m not talking about cars and beers, i’m talking about anything from toothpicks to rubix cubes. somewhere there will be a half naked woman cleaning her teeth with a tooth pick or a rubix cube in the cleft of a large bosom. have product must add tits.

what if i were to go to pick ‘n pay and find the butter wrapped in paper with men in underpants? or that the tampon boxes had seductive men in board shorts enticing me to buy them? would i prefer that to the florals? and when you got home, would you have to hide the butter and tampons from your husband/partner? what if sewing machine ads had hot men draped over them? if i googled ‘hat’ or ‘dog’ or ‘fishpaste’ and found them dotted with muscular men with their shirts off?

as i said, it must be difficult being a man…..

one helluva woman!

my great-grandmother was one helluva woman who had 15 children and that of course is one of the reason’s why the world is over-populated, half filled with her progeny’s progeny. perhaps the catholic church will take note of this now, but in those days, this certainly wasn’t much of a problem. travelling from acacia tree to acacia tree by ox wagon, one would be more of the opinion that the world needs a few more faces inbetween.

of course, my great-grandmother, florence harington (nee rorke), was an exceptional woman of good irish stock, as having 15 children is not exactly an idle hobby. in 3 generations, however, it demonstrates how the world has changed, as a nest over flowing with children is no longer really feasible, unless of course you can all athletic and can travel the world sponsored by nike.

besides the obvious, that modern women are not willing to have their upper body parts dangling onto their knees by the time no. 6 comes along, there are a many very practical issues getting in the way. one could simply not afford to have 16 children. you would have to hire a train carriage simply to get them too and from school, as an ox wagon would be a tad inconvenient on the roads these days. perhaps if salt lake city were to invest in car manufacturing a solution could be at hand, but until then….

clothing would be another problem as these days people don’t wear 2 outfits and wash them once a week. pep stores clothing doesn’t even last one child one season, so the possibilities of hand-me-downs is slim. evenings sitting sewing clothes for a large brood would mean that homework would never be done. “i’m, sorry sir, i didn’t do my maths as i was knitting my fifth oldest brother a vest.”

school fees would be entirely prohibitive and one would have to use the children as a marketing tool simply to buy their stationary. now imagine how many class meetings one would have to attend and many years and years and years of school plays, swimming galas, soccer matches, ballet performances, eistedfodds, school fetes and more. and you thought having two children was tough!

of course in days gone by the eldest children would help look after the younger ones and when you went off to work your salary went straight to your mother and you were grateful for any pocket money she dished out. these days it’s hard enough getting the older children to recognise that they have family members who are also part of the human race as well. furthermore  getting children to simply do the washing up and clean their own rooms requires a UN peace keeping force.

nah, i think the era of spawning offspring is really over. today’s costs make it so prohibitive that one would need the salary of, ehm, someone like a let’s say a president, in order to just to be able to feed them. seeing that it’s woman’s day though, i think my great-grandmother and all other woman like her should be given the noble peace prize at the very least. so here we go grandma!

hirsute

do you ever have one of those moments when a warm spell arrives during winter and you, having become quite lax about hair removal over the cold season, glance down only to be met by a great grassy plain of the lowlands? oops!

can one help becoming rather tardy about these things after 30 years or more of mowing?

i know at this point we have 2 camps – those who this this NEVER happens to and those who pretend that it never happens to them. the thing is that most men don’t even notice when you’ve has a haircut on your head – the part that glares out and says ‘hello darling!’, so believe me there’s a good change that it’ll take them 6 months to notice the savannah grasslands on your legs. so the real reason we do it is for ourselves and to avoid the lemon look of other women.

i suppose if the texture and colour of my hair could be spotted with a pair of binoculars from the south pole, i would certainly pay more attention to bodily landscaping, but that is not the case, which leads to a little neglect, alhtough it could might save me from some rather gauche moments.

a few months ago i went to  wedding, which requires a fair amount of time in the bathroom mowing and pruning and re-moulding. it was a hot day and i had a great pair of vintage suede high-heel shoes on (italian, mind you), when, at the reception, i glanced down and saw a tuft of pampas grass on my foot, glistening in the evening sun. i had missed a spot! either my bathroom needs better lighting or the old eyesight isn’t quite what it was, but there i was amongst gucci-ed italians and high-heeled, lip-sticked afrikaners of somerset west, trying to hide my shimmering piece of vegetation.

one would think by now that the evolutionary process would have noticed women’s eternal removal of bodily hair, sometimes to the extreme, to gradually start shaping us into what we prefer and so that the earth would have to swallow fewer mounds of disposable razors. something which i just cannot get myself to buy, so when i’ve run out of wax i reach for the cyclops’ sturdy old razor that the next twenty generations can still use.(i also use his shaving foam – but that’s between you and me!)

so roll on summer, but leave my legs out of it please!

 

 

 

shipwrecked!

There’s a little person inside my brain who goes around switching lights on and off.  sometimes too many lights are on at the same time and at other times the bastard has switched them all off. try as I may to get him to conform i just cannot succeed. he has a tireless and nasty sense of humour.

i know this can’t be normal because when i observe the cyclops his little man only switches one light on and off at time. CLICK!!!! lights out! just one designer lamp flickering in the corner…..

i spend much of my waking day trying to get my little man to switch off a few lights, but he takes revenge by occasionally switching them all off and goes to sleep. this is usually when i most need the lights ON. i stand on my head, i go for walks, i glare at my computer screen, i stare aimlessly into space. darkness. just the precocious snoring of the little man in my head. zzzzzzzzzzzzz

there are times when he slows down and switches one on for a loooonngg time. an absolutely random act of kindness. this can be most inconvenient as i may be doing something else. i can’t drop cooking supper, fetching children, helping with homework or even doing another job when the lighthouse comes on. the ships just have to crash.

there’s all this talk of meditation to get your little man to behave. like a crash course in parenting. my little man is no zen buddhist. he’s a virgin active kind of guy.

dammit, he’s just switched off the writing light…..

a bum deal!

the problem with my brain is an alarming lack of direction. i’m not talking vocationally or esoterically (that’s another story) what i mean is that i can walk into a shopping centre and not find where i came in. in order to avoid these life threatening situations i try to concentrate VERY, VERY hard, if alone, otherwise i rely on family to get me to my destination. it can be just as alarming going into a house with an inordinate amount of rooms. the trouble is usually finding one’s way from the bathroom back to civilised company. the bathroom was the basis of my last bit of trouble.

we arrived on our holiday in vermaaklikheid sans toilet paper. i admit, it was an error, but really and truly, it would be a lovely little gesture if holidays house renters could just provide 4 or 5 rolls of the stuff. it wouldn’t break the bank. as a consolation we got flossie, the cleaner, who came in daily, which was truly, truly wonderful, but i do find it easier to wash some pots rather than my butt, so that was not enough consolation for me.

the cyclop’s on the other hand said,”oh you just take a shower”. this is one of the extreme – men are from mars moments, as there is most definitely double ply on venus. so off i went to the hamlet of vermaaklikheid in search of one of civilisation’s greatest gifts to women.

easier said than done.

the dorpie of vermaaklikheid is a scattering of houses on a few hillocks and a main road which, from our holiday house road, one enters from a t-junction. this should be a simple matter, but not for those who are directionally impaired. this little journey i had to do 3 times (explanation still coming) and each time i was absolutely thrown as to whether to turn left or right and whether the road back was left or right. hoo boy! i think i’ll keep mum on that little bit of technical data when i apply to become a member of mensa….

why 3 times? well, essentially the one and only little shop-come-post-office-come-ice-cream-seller-come-airtime-seller was closed. the first time i was told “dis maandag, hulle is dorp toe”. hmm, half way with the tissue box. day 2 i set off for the land of toilet paper only to find it closed again. “hulle is seker see toe, hulle is visvangers”. now that box of tissues was REALLY getting low. i’ll have you know that a box of tissues stretches much further than i ever thought.

day 3. the box of tissues is empty. “die winkel it toe!” not just for the morning or the day or the hour. closed finished and klaar. “maar daar is a huis winkel”.

i set off to the bustling metropolis of toilet paper land again. slowly keeping the oil sump clear of the humps and bumps in the dirt road for the third time (the oil sump is yet another story), searching the vast expanses of vermaaklikheid for the huiswinkel. “dis die bruin huis agter die ander winkel”. yeah right. finally, i find a brown house filled with powerboats and vissermans and by pure chance discover that this indeed is the huiswinkel.

this is another one of those moments when i’m pushed into a time machine and find myself back in Bbloemfontein. the oomie and his boep sits drinking beer on the stoep, the long life milk lives next to the gamma gamma and the chocolates hide behind an old towel next to the parakeets in the bird cage. there is the perfunctory rugby paraphernalia and i haul out my beste afrikaans. i’m too scared to ask for real butter, but toilet paper is what i need and toilet paper is what they have, in a manner of speaking anyway. it’s the kind of stuff that’s so thin it could double up as sunglasses, but it far, far better than a shower. oh and i did manage to find way back- when you have 5 rolls of toilet paper and a long-life milk, everything returns to normal….

the ring

the hubby is a lovely thing,
he makes me laugh and sometimes sing,
but what i don’t quite get,
is how he hasn’t figured yet,
that to leave a ring around the bath,
is not a joke, it’s not a laugh!

he cleans the kitchen, scrubs the pots,
takes the son on sailing yachts,
makes the coffee, boils the milk,
buys me undies, perhaps not of silk,
but still there is the ring around the bath,
no, not funny, no, not a laugh!

sometimes he’s grizzly like a bear,
and parts are missing from his hair,
but still he’s silly and at times a wit,
there are lots of parts i don’t mind a bit,
but when it comes to rings around the bath,
it’s not quite funny, i just can’t laugh

he pays most bills and buys us treats,
for a man, i’d say he’s rather neat,
he knows the button on the wash machine,
but doesn’t seem to like a bathroom clean,
so that ring he leaves around the bath,
its just not funny, it’s not a laugh!