Living for Disco

G and I are getting married in less than six months. We’ve already told everyone the date, numerous times, and asked them to keep it aside, but now we wish to send out the invitations. They’re all done, and look marvellous and spiffy, thanks to my friend Maurice, who sorted the design and printing for us and made us very happy.

What is not making us happy, however, is the Royal Mail. We thought that it might be nice to order fancy stamps to go on the envelopes, just to make them look pretty – not that anyone is going to notice the stamps, but it’s the little touches, no? So, just over two weeks ago, we ordered a large number of bird and insect (birds and bees – geddit?) stamps from the Royal Mail website.

Now, I may be naive (charmingly, so I’m sure), but shouldn’t the Royal Mail at least be able to deliver their own product in a swift and efficient fashion? I don’t really understand the delay. If Amazon can get an iPod sent to me within 3 working days, then why can’t the Royal Mail simply whip a few stamps off the warehouse shelf, shove them in an envelope, and, oh, I don’t know, post them?

The only thing I can think of is that they are so dedicated to providing us with special stamps that they have commissioned a photographer to go out and photograph 80 different birds and insects, and they are glueing those photographs onto pre-gummed, stamp shaped bits of paper as we speak.

I have been forced to come to the conclusion that the Royal Mail are rubbish – that someone else is responsible for successfully delivering all the mail, and selflessly are letting the Royal Mail take credit.

Whoever you are, please, please can you deliver my stamps? Or all my friends are going to forget and no-one will be at my wedding except for the bridesmaids, and possibly the best man, and the groom, if they haven’t been peppered with shot, run over by a go-kart, or suffocated by a lap dancer at the stag do.

Disaster looms!

An onion shortage threatens the citizens of Britain. What are we to do?

Admittedly, my beloved and I had prior warning of this impending doom from the people who supply us with our veggie box. They told us even in December that the near-apocalyptic rainfall of last year had a devastating effect on onion storage, and that the onions are rotting from the inside out. Whole sheds full of onions, tucked away like hibernating squirrels in readiness for spring, are succumbing to a hideous plague.

But, alas, we failed to do anything about it. I always fail to grasp the profit in situations. Instead of building an onion storage depot in the back yard, and packing tons of them away in sand, a la Jamie Oliver, I simply shrugged, put on my coat and drove to work. Now, of course, I realise that I could have started to stockpile onions months ago, when prices were still reasonable, and even now could be making a fortune on the black market.

But now the whole country knows. The BBC did an emergency broadcast this morning from a vegetable packing shed. It’s blatant scaremongering is what it is. Before we know it there’ll be a run on supermarkets. People will be scrapping in the vegetable aisles, and fighting over the shallots.

They think they’ve got it bad in Zimbabwe? I tell you, they know nothing.

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.

I don’t have a washing machine. After years of taking laundry for granted, it seemed like a small sacrifice to make in the name of volunteering for a Good Cause*. So, I didn’t expect to have a washing machine in Namibia, and had resigned myself to two years of wearing my clothes until they turned brown and fell off hand washing in a plastic tub. I optimistically imagined that this was going to finish off my bingo wings once and for all, and that I would return to the UK with beautifully toned arms and a six pack, all as a result of spending a morning on my knees twice a week, scrubbing as a good scrubber should.

It hasn’t really turned out like that, mainly because I have a bathtub. I never realized how wonderful bathtubs could be until I started doing all my handwashing in them. It goes like so:

Step 1: Run an extremely hot bath and dump clothes in.
Step 2: Put OMO washing powder on top.
Step 3: Watch a DVD while all skin and hair in clothes dissolves thanks to incredible caustic powers of OMO.
Step 4: Step into water, now the colour of crude oil, and stomp up and down on clothes.
Step 5: Run a rinse. Dump clothes in. Stomp on them for 30 seconds.
Step 6: Have a cup of tea, and read a book.
Step 7: Run another rinse.
Step 8: Open a beer, and stomp up and down on clothes until bored.
Step 9: Hang clothes on washing line.
It’s so easy.

Unfortunately, no amount of stomping and OMO seems to have any effect on my white towels, or on my pale coloured bedclothes. Handwashing does not remove hair from sheets. It does not get brown ick off white towels. Don’t even ask me how the brown ick got there in the first place – this is Namibia, land of dust and sand. And I took them camping. I am not to blame.

So tomorrow, I’m going to try and weasel my way into my friend Tariq’s good graces, in the hope that he will let me use his washing machine to wash my whites in.

I can’t tell you how terribly excited I am about this.

Today I bought a cast iron casserole dish. It’s quite a cool casserole dish – a version of what people in these parts call a ‘potjie’, inexplicably pronounced ‘poikie’.

Potjies are very popular as an alternative to frazzling slabs of dead kudu over a roaring fire. Instead, you fill a heavy, three-legged cast iron pot with various ingredients, including slabs of dead kudu if you so desire, set it over a roaring fire and sit drinking wine while it bubbles aromatically away.

The casserole dish I bought is part of an attempt on my part actually to learn to cook. I thought, I can either be miserable and bitter, and eat toast, or I can spend too much money of fancy kitchen ware and become fat and jolly. I like the idea of spending money, so it wasn’t a tough decision.

Last night, I had it in my head to try a new recipe for beef stew. Unfortunately I didn’t realize that it required the use of a casserole dish. All of the pans that my house came with are made of tin foil, and have one wobbly handle, making sieving spaghetti a dangerous challenge. None of the lids fit. Clearly none were suitable for casseroling.

So I bought a cast iron one instead, despite several misgivings about how my extremely small counter-top stove is going to cope with it. I’m worried that I may have been rash and that it’s not even going to fit in the oven.

Should this be the case, I will just have to make sure I take it with me everywhere, in case the opportunity to casserole should unexpectedly crop up. It’s very heavy, and cumbersome, but it does come with a handy carry bag, just to make life easier for the roving chef.

Sometimes I marvel at a national mentality that provides specially designed carrying cases for casserole dishes, and I relish the opportunity to use it.

All the same, I really, really hope it fits.