Living for Disco

I have, just this minute, utterly lost any scant faith I may have had in the Microsoft spelling and grammar checker in Word.

I’m already cheesed off, because it insists on Americanising all my spelling, despite my settings being set to English (United Kingdom) on a daily basis. Which is annoying.

But can someone tell me, please, because I’m dying to know, what is wrong with this sentence?

“In the evening, the group met with other young musicians from the Oshikuku area, in order to listen to them perform.”

According to Word, it is all wrong. Terribly not done, darling. The irritating wavy green line underneath it tells me so. It helpfully suggests the following amendment:

“In the evening, the group met with other young musicians from the Oshikuku area, in order to listen to them performs.”

Which is clearly perfectly grammatically correct. Clearly.

I went horse-riding at the weekend.

I’m not a very elegant rider. I can ride, but I’m not vastly experienced. The first time I went here, I rode with some Dutch friends. In the course of the ride, I discovered that they’d all been brought up on horseback. Thus I was hugely thankful for the stubborn, lazy old horse across whose wide back I was straddled, because he stayed firmly at the back, sparing everyone the sight of my arse waving about in the air as I tried to find the horse’s rhythm.

Yesterday was better. I was less nervous about falling off and shattering my skull into tiny pieces because I’d brought my cycle helmet, and it all came back to me pretty early on. The only trouble I had was trying to stop my noble steed turning and heading for home every time a well-known shortcut hove into view.

“Pull the right rein…”, shouted my friend, her voice drifting over from a distant path on the other side of the hill.

“I am, I am”, I bellowed, as the fiend pulled the reins from my hands again and ambled off into a morass of strung-out spiders’ webs in order to find some juicy grass and have a good, leisurely fart. The spiders are huge, and orange, and look like something out of Starship Troopers.

My problem is that I can imagine having a bit in my mouth, and I can imagine how much I’d hate anyone who yanked it about without any consideration. I know that, somehow, I expect the animal to read my mind, and go the way I want without my having to explain it to it in fancy terms. My empathy and expectation of animal telepathy is the horse’s excuse to be a wanker.

Anyway, eventually I found a tone to which the horse responded (“Listen, you fucker, get out of the camel-thorn tree, or I’ll kick you in the fucking nuts”), and started being firmer on the bit, and we returned to the fray.

And it was beautiful. Early evening’s alchemy turned the abundant grass to a whispering carpet of gold. The sun reflected flashes of fire in the river, serene in its wide, stony bed. Eland and oryx, fat on the copious greenery, stood alert and watched us pass. As we cantered along the long-shadowed path towards home, a huge herd of blue-grey wildebeest stampeded in front of us, shaking their thick, heavily bearded and war-painted necks, and kicking up dust.

The alarming bruises on the inside of my thighs were worth every second.

It is butterfly season here. As I mentioned in the last post, butterflies have become a standard attachment to any self-respecting front-fender, or windscreen wiper. And yet, despite the millions that doom themselves simply by fluttering prettily above the warm tarmac, there still seems to be an endless supply of them.

There is a bush outside our office which is a mass of pink flowers. You can’t see the flowers though, because the whole damn thing is covered in butterflies. It’s like the plant itself is alive, or as if they are attempting to carry it off to some sacred butterfly haven, so that that they can continue to worship its pinkness without having to worry about traffic.

I might try and take a photo.

Apart from this, everywhere you go, the air is full of flickering wings. Windhoek is unusually green right now, with grass verges that reach almost to my armpits. The grass, the trees, the road, the houses, all are adorned with a flittery canopy of butterflies.

Unfortunately, it also means that the place is full of moths. A few weeks ago, the Bloke’s outside walls were crawling with pale winged specimens that laid their eggs, and then died in droves all around the house. They disappeared and have been replaced by similar, dark brown ones that are about the size of the palm of my hand. They get everywhere. I found one crawling up the arm of the sofa I was sitting on in the bar the other day.

I like to leave my sliding doors open at night, so that the fresh air gets in. This clearly extends an invitation to the bug population of the town, and my bedroom seems to have been chosen as the haunt of these moths. I didn’t mind them until last night, when I lit the mosquito coil and all the insects in the room went berserk, and started hurling themselves at the walls in an attempt to escape. I had a moth in my hair for almost a minute, and I can tell you, I didn’t think they made my skin crawl until I practically gave myself a concussion trying to get the damn thing off me.

In the end I just turned the light off, put a pillow over my head and went to sleep. When I woke up this morning, the walls were bare.

It has been raining pretty much incessantly here all week. The towels that I left on the line on Sunday afternoon have been getting almost-dry, and then are rained upon again, and so I left them there. I decided that enough was enough this morning, and went to move them to the line on my little porch.

That’s when I discovered that things have begun nesting in them, and that butterflies have got caught in the fibres. I had to take hold of one by the wings and pull, successfully detaching all but three stubborn legs from my nice, clean infested towels. Normally this would distress me more than it did, but I’ve been driving around Namibia a lot lately, and there are so many butterflies that I have become accustomed to seeing their innards splattered over windscreens and wipers, their vaguely, painfully fluttering wings festooning the radiators of vehicles in morbid decoration. So I wasn’t too phased about leaving its little legs stuck in the depths of the towel; just about picking the legs out afterwards. The thought of finding bits of butterfly limb, post-drying, in places where butterfly limbs aren’t meant to be does not appeal.

I’m going to soak them in bleach and hope that does the job instead.

On the plus side, tiny green sprouts have made an appearance in the basil corner of my little tub of soil. They are definitely fledgling leaves, and not dandruff from the woodworm-crazy beams. Despite the terrific excitement, I successfully resisted the temptation to dig them up and have a good look, and also to dig up the ones that are not sprouting to find out what the problem is.

I think that this shows remarkable restraint on my part.