Dining around the world
Everybody reads the BBC News - right? No point then in linking to its greatest Correspondents around the world blogging about their best and worst meals.
Tales from a hangover
When I first moved to Smithfield in early spring, the bug nightlife had just started warming up.
A few long legged spiders, not apparently interested in spinning webs, could be found hiding behind furniture and walking walls - no match for a shoe. As spring progressed, the moths and night flyers in their thousands, from hand sized feather dusters to spinning electrons, could be found orbiting the lights in their search for lunar fulfilment. Moths are cute, but a bit annoying when they hit you in the face every few seconds. I developed a strategy to keep them away from my computer monitor at night - the bulb above my desk was reduced and a series of ever increasing wattages led to the centre of the solar system in the hall. Doors were closed at dusk (to little apparent effect).
The occasional Shongololo found its way under the kitchen door and sailed majestically across the carpet - Shongololo is the Zulu name for centipede, a 4 inch long dark brown tube of crispy shell, we played with them as kids, they tickled and smelled funny when you chopped them in half.
Button spiders of various spinning abilities set up shop in corners. OK, well, they can eat some of the night flyers. And frogs started to squeeze under doors and sit under the lights - they took care of strays and debris. Frogs are cute too, if you are a small boy, but they also crap turds the size of a Shongololo and pee all over the place. Sitting in the cat’s water bowl can also be endearing. But then they started queuing up for a dip. I now have a door charge and no crap policy - if they don’t sign up they get flying lessons. With sufficient spin they Frisbee rather well, limbs akimbo they usually make it over the stoep.
Smithfield is basically in the desert, the town water tastes like chlorinated toxic waste. The borehole water isn’t bad, but must be saved for times of drought and rationed in the garden. So everybody gets excited with every spring shower, and around Xmas a good soaking is usually forthcoming. A couple of days of dramatic downpours and the garden goes from crusty toast to nuclear green. Then out of the sodden ground, like a scene from dawn of the dead, erupt the Shongololos in their millions.
They pour under the stoep door like a crude-oil waterfall, they re-enact the battle of Trafalgar on the carpet - the French and Spanish fleets in disarray, while a disciplined line of Nelsons Shongololos head for my feet. Fortunately they can be swept up rather easily - this slightly smaller variety will curl up into round pellets at the slightest touch of the broom. A four foot wide broom comes in really handy, and several sweeps a day keeps them at bay. But while it’s wet they just keep on coming, at night I hear cracking sounds as they fail to make it to the top of the 15 foot high walls and clatter to the floor. Totally harmless of course, but I have taken to wearing shoes at all times, it’s the rice crispy crunch of them underfoot that’s annoying.
And then there is Arachnid Solifugae, otherwise known locally as the Red Roman. The Red Roman can not be found in the tourist brochure, even here they are not mentioned in polite society, only after you have been here for a while will someone spill the beans and mention the battle they are having in the bathroom with one of these scurrying monsters. I had heard the rumours and braced myself for the worst, but I also wondered if my imagination was perhaps getting the better of reality. A few months ago I heard some scurrying behind a cupboard and went to investigate with a flashlight, only to jump out of my skin at the sight of a child’s pink plastic squid lodged among the debris. The scurrying turned out to be a mouse which the cat quickly dispatched (with a wink as it spaghetti slurped the last of the tail).
Arachnids are a group of bugs that include spiders scorpions and mites, and Solifuges are an order that range over most of Africa, usually favouring desert conditions.
To quote solpugid.com (bottom left picture) “They are hunters and catch their prey in large and powerful chelicerae. Solifuges vary from a few millimetres to 10 centimetres in length and look superficially like stout, hairy, fast-running spiders with an extra pair of legs.”
They are not known to be poisonous - David Attenborough would probably hold one delicately between thumb and forefinger. The Red Roman that revealed itself to me under a piece of hardboard in the dinning room was pink and had an abdomen the size of an egg. My brain simultaneously said ’so finally that’s what it looks like’ and ‘my god that’s fuckin disgusting’. I had a little drink the day before and considered the possibility that bug shaped delirium tremens had finally arrived. No this was the real thing, it looked much bigger than 10 cm and any minute now it was going to scurry. Shit I was leaning over it in shorts. I carefully backed off and removed a slipper. A house slipper? That was going to bounce off this monster. I sidled out and returned with a hiking shoe, it hadn’t moved. I considered going out to buy a pair of Wellington boots, but whacked instead. It disappeared in a cloud of plasma, even spiders leave a pair of legs, this bugger was history, nothing remained but goo. But why hadn’t it scurried? I wondered if it was already dead, either way, it was now.
I was lying in bed last night, keeping track of dark moving shapes on the ceiling with some mini binoculars (a Christmas present), and shooting the nearest ones with a water pistol (also a Christmas present), when I heard some cats wailing in the kitchen. I carefully shook out my slippers before crunching down the hall to break up the romance. There was a scurrying Red Roman in the passageway half the size of my first encounter - it did a couple of circles before I whacked it with my trusty slipper. It didn’t bother me in the slightest - even the big spiders no longer bother me. I crunched back to bed, turned off the lights and went to sleep.
Sleep tight!
The road to Malealea
I took a visa run last weekend to Lesotho, and Malealea lodge at the western end of the Drakensberg mountains.
You know you are a sad nerd when …
You blog about the cat …
You know you are a sad nerd in Africa, when,, you blog about a frog the frogs that turn up every night to take a dip in the cat’s water bowl.
I think I understand now why she doesn’t drink the water in the morning - frogs fuck in it.
Day of the Locusts
Huge clouds of Locusts swept over Smithfield today, they settled for a while in fields on either side of me, luckily they didn’t do too much damage, a stiff breeze blew up as they arrived and after an hour or so they had passed over. Still its an impressive site.