FLOWER STORIES

DURING a Skype chat with Piering and Bernard, we identified the drift of crocosmia below Pooh Corner. They are flowering everywhere on the mountain right now. And while we are on flowers, here is a pic of Neil's gorgeous water lilies at Damhoek, and one of Neil and Jonny admiring them.

THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER

HERE'S Jonny watching the sunset with the House at Pooh Corner in the background. A bit later we had dinner, and I watched him eat the lemon peels from the roast-chicken pot, then the mango skins, then the rosemary stalk, and then his and my chicken bones. Who needs a dog?

A SCHOOL, A HAIR SALON

THIS morning I drove down the mountain into the Tyume Valley to meet the principal of Gcato Senior Secondary School, Mr Anderson Dibela. The kids from the school were busy carrying their chairs and desks to the new school building, which replaces the one that was destroyed in a suspected arson attack in June 2008. Across the road, at the Binfield primary school, a boy was chasing three pigs off a makeshift athletics field so that he and his schoolmates could practise for an upcoming event. The entire valley is clad in a coat so green that it hurts the eye, and the clouds above me were swollen with rain.

Afterwards I drove to the nearest shops, in Alice, and found the God Is Great Hair Salon just outside the entrance to the shopping centre. It struck me as a good setting for another Alexander McCall Smith novel.

The third pic is the scene that met me as I left home this morning: a mare and her very shy foal grazing along the road next to our orchard.

NEW POOL

SATURDAY (Jan. 16) took me to Jonny's new training pool: the lochen at Hunterstoun. Despite possibly being the most beautiful natural pool in the whole wide world, it vied with the cricket at the Wanderers. Once the pool had won, we walked there and encountered the village dogs and then a troop of baboons on Oak Avenue.

NEW VIEWS

FROM the House at Pooh Corner, some pics of a walk we did on Sunday from near the "radio tower" to an old trigonometrical station on the Menziesberg above the former Sunnyside farm, which is now part of the commercial forest. Life is quite sweet here. We saw cows and storks and a foal mistook the Jeep for its father and followed us on a gallop (well, it was that or it has a Sea Biscuit complex). On the way back we stuffed ourselves on blackberries, which grow wild along the road.

Looking towards the radio tower, from where one has great views of the Elandsberg and the Seymour valley

Jonny surveys the landscape