Showing posts with label newlands village. Show all posts
Showing posts with label newlands village. Show all posts

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Coffee and red velvet cake

Dark clouds are gathering over Devil's Peak and there's a most welcome cool, almost chilly breeze after a scorching summer's day in Cape Town. Could it possibly rain?

I've just taken a stride through the suburb, which I expect to be leaving at month-end as I move into a place of my own.

I'm in Newlands village for coffee, red velvet cake and a belated attempt at my morning pages.

While tomorrow I'm happily back at work, I am looking forward to exploring this amazingly accessible city - unless you're banished to the Cape flats by povety and apartheid of course - on the mountain bike I brought from Johannesburg.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

'Charles time'

The early morning is mine, I'm nurturing me:

My red and glass Bodum plunger is percolating with a quality 100% Arabica bean breakfast blend; the aroma fills the spacious and sunlit attic.

The body-length couch I have to myself and a teenage sphinx cat that's vibrating with life-contentment; we're sharing body warmth.

Despite the sunshine here on the lower slopes, the mountain is dark in cloud shadow and foreboding, more than hinting at the four day's rain that's forecast - hooray!

The house creaks and clicks from the sporadic gusts of wind that sweep the old suburb; it also whistles through the crack-wide open wooden frame windows; these are decorated chess board like with leaden cottage panes.

Other than wind sound a lawn mower hums bumble bee-like in the garden behind, a vacuum cleaner screaches across the downstairs wooden floors, I feel my heart beat against my left chest.

Altthough Natalie Goldberg's 'Writing Down the Bones' and a 1965 Claremont library print of Johannes Meintjies' 'Olive Schreiner Potrait of a South African Woman' entice me from the coffee table, it's my black-cover / red-bound 288-page morning pages counter book that will have my attention. And heart.

Peace and contentment reign.

[I took the photo in Newlands village on perfect day Saturday afternoon while walking home; all-in-all I walked over 10 km in sheer bliss at the day and joie de vivre.]