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

JAMMY'S BIRTHDAY

DAVID Jammy's birthday yesterday. I dragged Jonny out, sick as he was (and still is). Graeme and Claire and Nadine Zylstra and Karen Harber came, too. Here are some pics.

"Feliz compleanos David" is what's written on the cake (I think)

Wearing and trying out some of his presents

Karen is hiding in between Monika and Jonny

WHAT WE DID (2)

IT has stopped raining -- I suppose that's the best thing that could have happened to Piering and Bernard's visit. They walked across the Brooklyn Bridge this morning; I went with them and then came home to work. I think they then walked around Downtown to see the World Trade Centre site and St Paul's Chapel (where George Washington once had a pew), buggered about Chelsea and had dim sum in Chinatown. Right now they're seeing Aïda at the Metropolitan Opera, and they may have had oysters at Grand Central Station before that. One recounts these things so that Christina and Oscar know what their parents are up to.

On the corner of our street, a flutist and violinist are giving a street concert. They're reading their score by bicycle lights. We really need a speleologist around.

WHAT WE DID

PIERING and Bernard are here, and we had a great day. Especially for Bea's benefit, I announced just now on Facebook that Piering had fallen off her chair -- helplessly so -- in the Henry Public. The rather green waiter did not know whether he should help her up or roll around on the floor screaming with laughter with me and Bernard.

We saw the Vermeer exhibition at the Met and the very special Georgia O'Keeffe abstracts at the Whitney, and then walked through Central Park just after the rain stopped and the yellow leaves really burned in the late-afternoon light. We stopped at home briefly, and then went to Douglas Rogers's reading at the Book Court. Here are some pics of the day...

In the Greek and Roman sculpture gallery at the Metropolitan Museum

Central Park...

The Whitney's foyer

RAWTHER FUN, BUT AT THE WALDORF

WE have a friend, Johnny Orford, who lives on the tippy-top floor of the... OK, it's not the Plaza -- he's spending two nights at the Waldorf, and we went to have drinks with him and his cousin, James Orford. Nice boys.

CATSKILLS WEEKEND

WE spent the weekend on a farm in the Catskills, eating and walking when it didn't rain. The trees are in full fall foliage. Monika watched many films for a festival she's programming, and David spent a lot of time with his hand on her stomach in the hope that his son would kick. On the way home, we had lunch in Woodstock. Tomorrow evening, Piering and Bernard arrive.

CATCH-UP (1): ACROSS THE BRIDGE

I CAN play catch-up forever with this blog, but here's a clip of a taxi trip across the Manhattan Bridge to go eat Indian in Manhattan (from 5 July 2009).

DIM SUM GO GO

DIM SUM for lunch today at Dim Sum Go Go on East Broadway in Chinatown, just around the corner from the Manhattan side of the Manhattan Bridge. Rather good stuff -- and a great logo, too, I think. We biked there and met Monika and David and their friend, Fernando Epstein. His film, Whisky, is showing here at the moment. The man on the bicycle in the last pic just drove into the frame.

BLISTERING BOCCE BALL BATTLE

GRAEME and Jonny threw bocce balls about on Union Hall's court last Sunday evening. The only thing I threw was my Manhattan, all over the rickety table I bumped against, and all over myself. Forgive me, Graeme, but I think Jonny showed that he's inherited his grandmother Nevsky and his aunt Joyce's bowls talent.

STOOP SALE

DAVID and Monika had a stoop sale today because he's moving out of the Brooklyn Heights apartment where he's lived for the last year. Being them, it was a very chic sale. Bea's friend, Libby, came as well, and afterwards we cycled with her through Dumbo and Red Hook and had lemonade and key-lime pie at Steve's. Great day.

Libby, David, Monika and Jonny in Schermerhorn Street

From below the Brooklyn Bridge

HAS FACEBOOK HIJACKED THIS BLOG?

I HAVEN'T posted anything here since March; all my secrets and opinions are divulged on Facebook these days. So, there's a lot of catch-up to do, and photos and videos to post. Will get onto it.

CARROLL STREET SNOW

I KNOW this blog contains an inordinate number of references to the weather. I blame my mother for my obsession. But this morning I don't feel too self-conscious about posting a small video of our street, filmed from the stoop at about 6.30am. Everything is covered in about 12 inches of powder; the schools have closed for the day because "near white-out" conditions are forecast for later. It's 9.30am now, and it's still coming down heavily. An e-mail earlier told us to use our own judgment when deciding whether to go to the office or stay at home.

CHRISTMAS DAY IN PHILADELPHIA

WE spent Christmas Day with Claire's family in Philadelphia. On our way back, we drove past the lights put up by residents around 86th Street in Brooklyn.

CHRISTMAS EVE EGGNOG AT MINA & DAYTON'S

MINA Jones and Dayton Clark without doubt are the best landlords we've ever had. And Mina's eggnog was as good as the batch Sunny von Bulow always had at hand in Reversal of Fortune. Their sons, Matteo and Isaio, and their lovely dog, Mimi, are also here.

P.D.T. HOW OLD I AM

Saturday, 7 February: Until this morning, my birthday yesterday was a blur. Late Thursday evening I went out with David Jammy and that wonderful girlfriend of his, Monika Wagenberg. David was intent on getting us into a bar called P.D.T. (they make one swear a non-breakable blood oath not to divulge what it stands for), but we were not among the chosen. Trying to plant one’s butt on a stool at its copper-topped bar counter involves visiting a small fast-food place called Crif Dogs, on St Mark's Place in the East Village, where the staff point you to a wood-panelled vintage phone booth with a white house phone. You press the button on the phone and Miss Chastity Lovely, tall and gorgeous, opens a secret door in the wall of the phone booth. "I am so sorry, but we have absolutely no space available. Maybe I'll have a table in the next hour and a half. Or next week, perhaps?" You crane to see behind her (not an easy thing because she's got a swimmer's shoulders) and there are at least two empty banquettes. David opened his charm tap but it slid off her like a mink coat from bare skin. He tried to convince her that, because I’m so terribly old, I might die of the shock I’d suffer if I had to enter a new year in, oh, say, the Odessa Café. Which is exactly where we celebrated my birthday. Miss Lovely eventually phoned and we had early-morning cocktails at P.D.T. (mine was delicious, even if by now I have entirely forgotten what was in it), and David had a hot dog that arrived via a secret service hatch. Eventually it was very late and it had all been a bit too much, so in the cab home David and I competed to explain to Monika what lovely friends we have in Joburg, and how they adore us so much, and how long we have known them, and where we met each one the first time, and how much we love them, and how much they will love her. A fine, fine birthday.

TED HAGGARD'S POOR WIFE

IT really always is the wife who suffers. Last year it was New York governor Eliot Spitzer's wife, Silda, who had to stand at his side at press conference after press conference, pale and haggard-looking, listening to him confess to visiting prostitutes all over Washington. Now it is Gayle Haggard who has to go on Larry King and every single TV network to stand by her man, Ted, the founder of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, who has had to admit buying crystal meth from a male prostitute and to soliciting men for sex. Here he is on Larry King again, saying he still has "sexual thoughts" about other men and admitting to "sexual immorality" with a male prostitute. But, believe it or not, he is just not homosexual, and Gayle has to suffer the indignity of describing her great sex life with Ted.

His first therapist, Ted says, told him, "You are a heterosexual with homosexual attachments." His current counsellor calls it "homosexual complications". "I don't think these boxes work for me," he self-analyses. "I have some thoughts and processes in my life that just don't fit into boxes. And today I am 100% satisfied with my relationship with my wife."

Ted says he's "over the hump". He's not thought of men, really, for, what, almost a year now? And the Scriptures have really come alive for him during this period of his crisis. (In Ted's church, those Scriptures will, of course, condemn him to eternal hell for practising homosexuality.)

Can't Gayle just give Ted up as a bad job? She tells Larry King, "I really do love this man. He's more than the complications and flaws that he's committed. To restore honour to our children, the best thing I could do is to restore honour to their father. Jesus teaches us to forgive 70 times 7." So what does this mean? Ted can solicit another 68 times 7 men before she gives up on him?

Of course, there is the wonderful irony and schadenfreude of seeing this nationwide spiritual hero, the leader of the 30-million-strong National Association of Evangelicals, who has spoken out against homosexuality (but whose church has a comparatively tolerant attitude to homosexuality and supports civil unions for gays and lesbians), go down for something he has so consistently called "wrong" in his sermons.

Here's Ted bashing homosexuality.