Living for Disco

The other day I noticed strange pile of dust behind the toilet.  I don’t often never ever clean behind the toilet, simply because it is fiddly, and involves getting down on my hands and knees and putting my head near the toilet bowl.  However, I noticed this pile of dust because it is growing, and dust does not usually multiply itself unless it is evil in some fundamental way.  It was also covered in ants.

There have been a lot of flying ants making merry in my house recently.  They buzz around my bed at night, and drop onto my face in the dark.  A while back I heard a revolting story from a friend, who woke up one night to see a spider crawling out of her boyfriend’s nose, so I’ve been sleeping with a mosquito coil burning not quite near enough to my head to set my hair on fire.  It seems to have done the trick, but I am fed up with ants, and other kinds of bugs, invading my house.  I’m sorry to go on, but really… when will it end?

Last night, I decided to nuke the dust with Doom (The Greatest Invention In The World^tm), in case it happened to be an ant metropolis.  I now realize that this was an unwise decision, but nothing seemed to happen to it at first, so I left it, meaning to return later to sweep it up.

When I came back, armed with a dustpan and brush, the dust had vanished, to be replaced with approximately 100,000,000,000 ants.  I’ve never thought carpets in the bathroom were a good idea, particularly not if they are made entirely out of insects.  Most of them were mobile, but some were belly up, waving their little legs at the ceiling, gasping their last gasps.  It was vile.  So I nuked them all again, swept them all up, and flushed them down the loo.

This morning, however, they were back, I assume to exact their terrible revenge.  There were tons of the little fuckers floating in my bath water this morning.  They are everywhere.  It makes me want to weep.

Anyone?  Ants?  How do I get rid of them….

The man has an incipient mullet, and is wearing disgraceful grey polyester trousers with a trailing hem; they are too short, and display a pair of limp grey socks inside brown plastic loafers.  He is also sporting a foul dark beige shirt that hasn’t seen the hot side of an iron since 1976.  I take this as a bad sign.

He gets my back up immediately by snidely berating us all for being late.  The programme on the wall states that we should all have been there at 8.20, but we all have emails to prove that we were asked to be present at 9.  When I point this out he smiles nastily at me, scratches his polyester crotch through his pocket, and says “Yes, but it’s now nearly half past.”  He is lying.  It’s 9.15, and we’ve all been sitting patiently for him to begin for over five minutes.

He then gives us a long and very dull talk about rules, while excavating his breakfast from his back teeth with his finger, and having another go at it.  From the looks of it, it was quite a meal.  There’s a lot of chewing left to be done, for sure.

“And one last thing” he says.  “If we can all agree that this course is not like an omnibus.  We all get on here, and we get off together on Wednesday afternoon.  I don’t want to see anyone just showing up for lunch, or tea, or late.  We are here for your benefit – let’s see this thing through together”.  He makes a three-day monitoring and evaluation course sound like intensive group therapy.

We break at 1pm.  I see him tucking enthusiastically into hearty meal (and no doubt saving it in his cavities for later), but when we trail back into the room at 2, he is nowhere to be seen.  Clearly, his omnibus ticket is a flexible fare, as he remains invisible for the rest of the day.

Thankfully, so does his lunch.

I dyed my hair dark again a couple of days ago. Actually, it’s black, and has the effect of making me look pale and interesting, and so I have started to wear lipstick and a bit of fluffy pink powder on my cheeks to make me look less ‘living dead girl’.

So, this morning, I left my front gate, a little late, after having rinsed off the tasty, yet unflattering bits of rice pudding that had splattered onto my skirt from breakfast. Still, I felt shiny and new, and thoroughly hydrated – something that doesn’t happen often at this particularly sweaty time of year.

“Hello my dear” I heard David, the security guard next door say, as he habitually does, through the bougainvillea. Recently, he has taken to telling me how much my hair looks ‘not good’, so I thought ‘at least now my hair is dark, he can’t tell me how rubbish I look, and I won’t have to run inside for a balaclava/paper bag/shot of hard liquor’. And then…

“You slept well, yes?”

“Yes, thanks! I did, as a matter of fact.” I stopped short of skipping and saying ‘tra la la laaa’, but only because it was too hot.

“Yes, you do not look so terribly tired like you do every day.”

My GOD! It’s too hot for balaclavas. I am going to have to start bringing the gin into work.

Prince Charles has bought a house next door to my Mum!

Well, not quite, perhaps, but Myddfai*’s not far off. As far as I can remember it’s a pretty village, without many people in it. A bit like the village I grew up in, except a bit more picturesque, and in possession of a shop, and a post office.

Despite the naysayers who think that the mushrooming of unlived in holiday homes is sapping the life from villages in the area, I think that this could be very good for everyone. I expect he will be setting up one of his famous biscuit factories, which will provide many jobs.

I also expect when I go home, pull on my wellies and my waterproof, and take my daily ten mile walk into the soggy hills, as is my habit when I am at home**, I will be bumping into Prince William and his entourage, which no doubt includes many wealthy young bachelors in search of an alluring older woman to help corrupt them. I may have to adapt my wardrobe to the situation, and purchase some sexy tweed twin sets, or something. Mind you, they’ve probably got tweed twinsets coming out their ears. Maybe I should go for something scarlet, in satin, and buy wellies to match.

This is very exciting. I wonder if Mum will invite them round for tea?

*For those not familiar with Welsh pronunciations, this is pronounced Muthvye (th as in mother).

**I do not, as is commonly believed, spend days sitting on the sagging chair in the living room, waving imperiously at my mother to bring me tea, and demolishing packets of McVities plain chocolate homewheats, while watching back-to-back DVDs.

One of the things you never have to worry about in the UK is fresh food. Any vegetable, any fruit you could want or need is available, all year round, in staggering abundance.  Except perhaps for rhubarb, which is a crying shame.  Or a good thing for our health, depending on how you look at either rhubarb or the cultivation of fruit out of season.

Here, however, what’s in season very much dominates the supermarket shelves.  For most of the year, it’s impossible to find limes anywhere.  Making margaritas is a chore in this country, I can assure you.  Strawberries make a brief appearance as the weather warms up in September, but by mid-October they have fizzled out.  Avocados are like gold dust in winter.

When I arrived here in September of last year, one of the things I was most looking forward to was mangoes; juicy, sticky, blushing mangoes, with flesh the colour of late afternoon sunshine.  I asked someone in a supermarket in my first week, and he shook his head at me as if I was a mango short of a tropical fruit punch.  “No. No mangoes in Namibia” he said, and tried to move away from the crazy person.

“Will there be any soon?” I asked hopefully, fretfully, and was told that there would not. I think he was a bit worried that if he said ‘yes’ I might sit there in the fruit section until it started raining mangoes.  Fortunately, I found out that mango season does exist, and that you can’t move for the things come December.

So, I’ve been waiting, impatiently, for mangoes to start appearing the supermarkets, and yesterday I was rewarded. Somehow, the wait makes them more wonderful.

At the moment, the fruits are tiny, scarce and expensive.  Gradually, over the next few weeks, they’ll grow to the size of melons, and cost the equivalent of 20 pence.  The supermarket crates will be spilling over with the things, and I will be pureeing them, freezing them, making them into salads, sorbet, smoothies, cocktails (gin and fresh mango juice anyone?).  My chin will be perpetually smeared with mango.  Then, by March, they will have disappeared from whence they came, like the rain, or migrating birds - not to be seen until summer returns.

Here is a recipe for a mango salad that I made up (although it’s not particularly original), It does depend on the availability of limes, however, which is a pain in the pinny for me right now, because they haven’t made an appearance yet:

1 ripe mango, pitted
1 ripe papaya, seeded (keep the seeds)
½ an avocado
2 small red chillis, seeded
1 lump fresh ginger

For the dressing:

Olive oil (normal – the lighter the better)
Lime juice
Chilli oil

Slice the mango, papaya and avocado into slivers, or chunks, whichever you prefer.  Mix in a bowl.  Chop up the chillis very small, and scatter over the fruit (add seeds if you want it really hot).  Dice the ginger into tiny pieces and scatter over everything.  Mix.  If you like scatter some of the papaya seeds over the top.  They taste fresh and spicy, like watercress.

For the dressing, mix a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, a couple of teaspoons of chilli oil, and a couple of tablespoons of lime juice.  Add a pinch of salt.  Shake, and pour.

Eat.  Enjoy.  Try not to rub your eyes.