Small-town charm rocks

I love my village in the Cape. Every time I’m here I feel renewed, all barefoot, sun-soaked, capable, and freshly enamoured of this beautiful planet.

Yes, despite what’s going on in the wider world.

But this village of mine – you couldn’t make it up. Or maybe you could, because it’s like a book by cosy Karoo author Sally Andrew, one of her wonderful Tannie Maria tales.

True story, as read in the valley newspaper: there’s been a rash of twins on one street, which is curious enough, but their names are what’s really fabulous – Bronwin and Ronwin, Aiden and Eden, Nazeera and Nazeema, Kaylin and Taylin and Romano and Romario.

It’s like their parents want everyone, themselves included, to be permanently confused.

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True story: I have a business appointment with a man called, well, let’s call him Uys. Ag shame, someone says to me, poor Uys is such a cute little man – plays the piano in the NG Kerk – but he recently told his wife he was in love with someone else. A man nogal.

He still plays piano on Sundays, but now all the old tannies glare at him.

True story: a bearded, tie-dye bloke comes to fix my shower door. He’s a local handyman, or so I thought, until he told me that he has “patients in Ireland”. “Are you also a doctor?” I asked, amazed. No, I’m a sangoma, he told me, and I smiled benignly, giggling inside, wondering if his patients knew their traditional African doctor is a white hippie.

True story: I was at a local restaurant collecting a takeaway. “That smells lovely,” I said to the owner, meaning my olive-anchovy pizza. “Oh, that’s me,” said his friend. “I forgot my cigarettes but, luckily, I remembered my weed.”

And a memory surfaces from during the pandemic, when someone at the local market was selling their handmade face masks, all crocheted and lacy with holes. When I pointed out this design flaw, she retorted: “At least you can breathe in them.”

Then last week on a walk, I watched a scruffy lad strutting alone atop the reservoir. With his chest puffed out, his arms thrown wide, he cried to the sky: “I am the king! I am the king!”

And in this hot, dusty, windblown, crazy dorp, for half an hour on a sleepy Thursday afternoon, he was.

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