March in our False Bay garden and COVID-19

by Diana Studer

- gardening for biodiversity

in Cape Town, South Africa

South Africa has been in 21 day lockdown from midnight last Thursday. Since the Ungardener is on immune-suppressing drugs against rheumatoid arthritis our world has shrunk to the walls around our garden. He runs 30 laps in our garden. Three kilometres.

March sunset

I need to focus on my Holds upon Happiness. Listening to FMR Fine Music Radio where I have renewed my membership.

Time in, not out

For Sarah in Dorset and her Through the Garden Gate

Indigenous March flowers with Nerine sarniensis

For Gail in Tennessee and her Wildflower Wednesday

Indigenous March flowers with Rotheca myricoides

TMI watching a live update as the numbers tick by

TMI rationing my slot of live news from the Guardian

To mask or not?

Spekboom leaves are edible when we need fresh green

Somebody should do something about that has risen as Cape Town Together on Facebook and local to us Far South COVID-19 Response Group

Froggy Pond where we hear a live frog clicking at night

On social media I need to take a few deep breaths before, ever so politely, shouting at people who share sensationalist clickbaity fakenews. When I asked David Amerland why people prefer conspiracy theory to fact, he said - It lets them out of any responsibility. THEY should ... while I, take the easy option staying in my comfort zone. Don't ask me to change MY life. Science matters. With some reassurance.

We eradicated coronavirus in under 14 days.

Exotic plants from China, New Zealand, California ...
We are all in this pandemic together

TEARS (where our cat Zoe came from) has evacuated all dogs from their shelter into foster homes.

23 staff at the SPCA (where we found Pickwick, Aragon and Thomas) have chosen lockdown away from their families, with the animals, to provide emergency services.

Four teams of firefighters are in lockdown at fire stations. That bright smile in my mind as I thank frontline workers.

Searsia oozing gum. One has died.

The huge divide between middle class First World problems (<TMI we cut my hair yesterday) and large families in small homes needs a new way of setting priorities in future.

“One of the reasons underlying the investment gap in water and sanitation is that these services are perceived mainly as a social - and in some cases environmental - issue, rather than an economic one, like energy”

Sunk costs within the fossil fuel industry, farming, banking, private healthcare and other sectors prevent the rapid transformations we need. Money becomes more important than life.

If your son visits his girlfriend, and you later sneak over for coffee with a neighbor, your neighbor is now connected to the infected office worker that your son’s girlfriend’s mother shook hands with. 

Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy (BFAP) has warned that poorer households in South Africa would be put at risk, in terms of both their nutrition and health, if they suffer from a fall in their income or an increase in food prices, because of measures to counter, or the consequences of, the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Will we have done the impossible?

I read.

Rowan Coleman

The summer of impossible things

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She plays with the idea of rolling back time, and making that one small change for a different future. But, the ripples of that either / or?

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Read - All is still, the heat only now just peeling away to leave the world cooling at the edges - with gracious timing in that moment when I felt the first grateful touch of an evening breeze after a long HOT afternoon.

Jacques Peretti

Done - the secret deals that are changing our world

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Investigative journalist from the London School of Economics. (I did skim the chapters on risk and high finance)

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History in living memory, both my baby boomer generation and my parent's. His focus is still on 'growth' and ignores sustainability, but so fascinating to see the threads tied together.

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Jim Kim 'Globalisation worked marvellously for Korea, China, and most of East Asia, but not in Iowa or Wolverhampton - who voted Brexit and Trump'

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Joseph Nye 'If we looked at the world in 1800, you'd find that more than half of the world's people lived in Asia and they made more than half the world's product. Now fast forward to 1900: half the world's people - more than half - still live in Asia, but now they're making only a fifth of the world's product ... Industrial Revolution ... Europe and America ... What we're going to see in the twenty-first century is Asia returning ...

Portuguese buildings were covered in tiles after an earthquake and tsunami

Marita van der VYVER

Forget-me-not blues

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A letter from Portugal with saudade. Azul for the blue tiles and craftsman.

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Translated from Afrikaans, I read it again in the original language. Without the 'lost in translation' wobbles.

Die blou van onthou (the blue of remembering)

-'Stadig, stadig oor die klippertjies. Die reen val sulke wonderlike druppeltjies. Afrikaanse fado?'

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'Somewhere in the back of her mind she will have to make room for everything she isn't allowed to talk about, a kind of attic where she can hide all the shame and scandals of her house and her family and her country'
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'You don't remember what you want to remember, she is starting to realise for the first time. You remember what you remember'
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[recording family history]
'Om hierdie reddende tou van woorde oor te gee an die wat na haar kom' 

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'My book-mad mother was a firm believer that the right reader and the right book had to find each other at the right moment, then you could expect fireworks and miracles, otherwise reading was just reading'

I am currently immersed in a doorstop of Scandi noir. Not chosen for lockdown!

My sort of cartoons at the Guardian

And Mother Gaia

I am fascinated by sign language (since I have one deaf ear) Had to track this down - as minister and interpreter share big grins and giggles - just the first ten seconds!

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