Luna.

Angus, being a boisterous bull terrier, tends to hog the limelight.  There is no ignoring him even if you try and the same goes for Sam, our rather large ginger cat.  At first light Sam calls me for his food.  He shouts 'Mel, Mel, Mel' or 'Ma, ma, ma' as he plonks up the stairs.  If I do not immediately respond, he pats me in the face.  If he suspects that I am pretending to be asleep, (of course I am, who could sleep through Sam abuse?) he brings out his fail-safe, and somewhat painful, sneaky claw.  We do in fact have a third fur child, a very tiny, highly opinionated, grumpy black cat.  She chose my daughter at TEARS, the local animal shelter.  A rehabilitated feral cat, she had been completely disdainful of both her cat mates and the humans who tried to love her, but she greeted my daughter from her perch by putting her minute paws on her shoulders.  It was an instant bond.  As we left, this apparently solitary and unsociable cat, followed all the way down the enclosure and stretched her paw through the mesh of her cage. Cola came home and was renamed Luna.  It took some time and a lot of love from my daughter for Luna to settle in comfortably.  She slept on my daughter and helped with all her art projects.  Luna has never really meowed, she 'meeps' and makes bird-like squeaks.  When Angus arrived she still lived on the ground, but after she scratched his nose one day war was declared between the two.  From then on, if Angus saw Luna, the chase was with nasty intent.  Luna had to make hasty dash for the tree onto the roof or to the wall.  Luna, next to Sam, is a quarter of his size, but feisty.  She often boxed Sam even if he had done nothing.  He just sat there and took it with a silly look on his face!  Luna went missing once.  It was awful.  We put up posters and asked all over the neighbourhood.  I told my daughter who was heartbroken thinking Luna had left her, that Luna would be back if she could.  Two weeks later, while we were out, a kind neighbour phoned saying she thought she had seen Luna.  My daughter rushed home and phoned me in floods of tears because Luna had returned, very thin, but very happy to see her human.  We think she may have been shut in a garage when the neighbours went on holiday.  My daughter moved out last year into a block of flats where pets were not allowed.  Luna stayed at home and spent her time on the roof, off doing cat stuff or sitting in the middle of our, thankfully, quiet street, leg in the air, washing herself.  I worried that as she got older, her escaping skills would slow and Angus may catch her.  My daughter moved from the flat and into a pet-besotted house.  I suggested Luna move too.  I packed her little case with food, a bowl and her blanket and yesterday, Luna went to live a far more suitable cat life.  No chasing, lots of human contact, ground!  Queen Grumpy Cat, Looley Luna will rule the roost.  I will miss you little meeper, but your life is going to be wonderful from now on.

Mrs Fix-it.

I consider myself lucky to be a practical person.  Maybe I was a man in a previous life (men tend to be more practical because they are encouraged to be growing up) or my brain is just wired like that, but it is a useful and for me, very gratifying, thing.  I have a terrier mentality, tending to get my teeth into a problem and going at it until it is solved or fixed and fixed properly (not with five screws left over that clearly should be in there somewhere!)  Those tangled metal puzzles that came in Christmas crackers kept me quiet for hours!  I know I annoy people saying 'Let me try', fidgeting and looking over their shoulders until they do because I have already worked it out.  Anything mechanised is a matter of applying logic, though sadly these days things are not made to be fixed.  As a child I would be sifting through the neatly laid out parts of a broken radio or vacuum cleaner to find and fix the problem.  Sometimes, especially during rescues for some reason, the solution to a difficult extrication simply popped into my head.  I can relate to the apparent urban legend of the random person who saw a truck stuck under a bridge and casually suggested to a battery of engineers (who were scratching their heads about how to lift the bridge) that they let the tyres down.  Hooray!  Someone with simple common sense!  Nowadays with the advent of Google, I have the luxury of useful information at my fingertips to help me even with mysterious computer technology.  Obviously there are some things I will leave to the professionals, like major surgery (minor, in the case of a survival situation, I may attempt!), bomb disposal and of course my failing, mathematics.  The little x's and y's to the power of two in brackets may as well be the answer to how the pyramids were built or where the Yeti is hiding as far as I am concerned.  It would be simpler for me to construct a full size working model of a black hole than get my brain around algebra.  Although, in the construction process, I would be using it instinctively, wouldn't I.  Amazing how the brain works.  I am sure if I sat down and applied myself, I would get it but I am not inclined to!

Kommetjie, the beginning of the end.

As the warm summer evenings stay lighter longer I sit outside listening to the birds and watching the sky change.  It is idyllic here in Kommetjie and I am so blessed to have been able to call this village my home for the past twenty years.  There is a dark lining on the pink clouds though.  Kommetjie is threatened with development.  Development in the form of one hundred and seventy six duplex and simplex housing units, a retail park, the infrastructure that goes with it and that is just for starters.  When all this began, I wrote a carefully worded objection stating all the obvious, to me, reasons why this form of development should not be allowed.  I wrote about the existing traffic problems, the influx of people and their impact on the amenities, the environmental devastation, which is inevitable, including the destruction of the 'green lung' which has happened around the world and which nobody, clearly, has learned from.  I thought at the time that nobody in their right mind would approve this.  I, being an avid and passionate nature lover, did not factor in those who are simply not, those who are apathetic and those who are plain and simply, greedy.  I was shocked and dismayed when, a few weeks ago, the news broke that an environmental study group had approved the go ahead for the development.  No, no and no.  How could this happen?  Anyway, sentimentalism aside.  Let us look at the hard facts.  Money talks and it will probably win.  Those who stand to make money do not care about the objections, the signatures, the flora and fauna we fight so hard to preserve.  It is a case of bums in houses and hand rubbing, Fagin style, at how much money is in the bank.   No amount of reasonable discussion will sway the decision and I feel impotent that I cannot do more to fight this.  My home, my village is going to become another casualty to the corporates, ruining it forever.  I call on those who are like-minded to consider becoming eco-warriors.  Put up posters, write letters and when then time comes, stage a 'sit-in' in the face of bulldozers.  Will you?