a loaf of bread beneath the bough
Perhaps there is some balance in the Cosmic Wossnames after all, since after the rigours of Hellweek it has been a somewhat decadent weekend. Yesterday we Salty Crackered out at De Meye, which is a wine-farm out near Stellenbosch, with an attached restaurant called The Table, who do a strictly à la carte lunch menu in their beautiful little farmhouse, which looks like this (with bonus mother):
and is set in surroundings which look like this:
and which are profoundly un-kinking to the tense-tight muscles of the soul. We were the only guests there. The staff are lovely and relaxed, the food is marvellous, they fed us huge quantities ("there's more in the kitchen if you want it") of duck pâté and tomato soup and slow-roasted pork belly and hasselback potatoes and red cabbage with apple (stv's photos are lovely), and then for dessert we did this:
and they brought us chocolate gateau and coffee under the trees. After which we staggered home, too full to think straight.
Then today was Robbi's birthday at Kitima in Hout Bay, which does a lunch buffet of Asian food, which means for the first time in the history of ever I actually had enough dumplings. (I love dim sum. Three platefuls, and I told the nice chef "One of everything, please!" each time). And duck spring roll. And salmon hot/sour soup with tamarind, and roasted duck, and pork with ginger, and lemongrass icecream, and we staggered home too full to think straight. I'm sensing a theme.
Notwithstanding all of the above, I have also this weekend finished editing my Harry Potter paper, and sorted out my seminar outline (my teaching starts tomorrow), and found a bunch of interesting articles which will allow me to babble happily about shifting identities and symbols of skin and blood and jewels in Catherynne Valente's feminist rewrite of "Aschenpüttel", a word which my Evil Landlord has taught me how to pronounce. One of Saturday's drunken, overfed insights was that all Germans are telepathic. It made sense at the time. (Leaving the farm, there were roadworks and a couple of workers at either end of about a kilometre of road, stopping one lane at a time in synchronisation via some hidden communication. EL's comment: "Funny, he didn't look German.")
It was a lovely weekend, and tomorrow I don't have to be on campus at 7am, and there won't be umpty-million students wanting to change curriculum. Life's okay.
and is set in surroundings which look like this:
and which are profoundly un-kinking to the tense-tight muscles of the soul. We were the only guests there. The staff are lovely and relaxed, the food is marvellous, they fed us huge quantities ("there's more in the kitchen if you want it") of duck pâté and tomato soup and slow-roasted pork belly and hasselback potatoes and red cabbage with apple (stv's photos are lovely), and then for dessert we did this:
and they brought us chocolate gateau and coffee under the trees. After which we staggered home, too full to think straight.
Then today was Robbi's birthday at Kitima in Hout Bay, which does a lunch buffet of Asian food, which means for the first time in the history of ever I actually had enough dumplings. (I love dim sum. Three platefuls, and I told the nice chef "One of everything, please!" each time). And duck spring roll. And salmon hot/sour soup with tamarind, and roasted duck, and pork with ginger, and lemongrass icecream, and we staggered home too full to think straight. I'm sensing a theme.
Notwithstanding all of the above, I have also this weekend finished editing my Harry Potter paper, and sorted out my seminar outline (my teaching starts tomorrow), and found a bunch of interesting articles which will allow me to babble happily about shifting identities and symbols of skin and blood and jewels in Catherynne Valente's feminist rewrite of "Aschenpüttel", a word which my Evil Landlord has taught me how to pronounce. One of Saturday's drunken, overfed insights was that all Germans are telepathic. It made sense at the time. (Leaving the farm, there were roadworks and a couple of workers at either end of about a kilometre of road, stopping one lane at a time in synchronisation via some hidden communication. EL's comment: "Funny, he didn't look German.")
It was a lovely weekend, and tomorrow I don't have to be on campus at 7am, and there won't be umpty-million students wanting to change curriculum. Life's okay.