If you are into searching for hidden treasures, then the Milnerton flea market is the place to be on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. We are looking for some fittings for our antique toilet cistern, and the weather was lovely so we decided to go for a stroll.
assegai, anyone?
I was wondering how many steps we had taken as we meandered down one side of the large area and up the other, but my fitness app thinks I was riding a bicycle for the 51 minutes we were there, and recorded 8.65km. As a by-product of its confusion, I am now seriously worried about what I look like when I walk. Do I stomp? Do I glide? Do I sway from side to side?
The people who visit the flea market are as varied as the junk treasures on display. Sadly I did not get a picture of the woman whose unique style of ice cream eating should really have been recorded. Most people - I am sure - eat an ice cream cone by licking it. This woman stuck her tongue out in a way that would made her the star of any New Zealand team doing the haka. Then she wiped the ice cream all over her tongue before curling it up into her mouth. And repeat.
don't be so distracted by the guy on the right that you miss the doglet in the bag
We saw some fun signs while we were away. Like this one at Letaba Camp in the Kruger Park: here's what a sausage fruit looks like, in case you were wondering. and this one at the God's Window lookout at the Blyde River Canyon was my favourite:
Twenty years after I was born a Brooks, I became a Wilson in one of those happy-ever-after fantasies that didn't quite work out the way I had planned. But Wilson was a nice name, and eminently preferable to Brooks (which in Afrikaans means underpants or knickers and led to horrible teasing at school) and I quite enjoyed it. It was one of those anonymous names that everyone could spell and I liked the fact that it was totally normal at first look, but had a secret history. The great grandfather of the Mr Wilson I married had emigrated from somewhere near Moscow to the US and like so many others with unpronouncable or "difficult" names (I think it was Tobinofsky) he was given another one. One of the legends is that Wilson was chosen from the phone book, another is that he particularly admired a Wilson (couldn't have been Harold). So, for the next 25 years or so, I built my name and reputation as the journalist Lynne Wilson ... until I met and married my new happy-ever-a
A Boer woman with her dead child, the last of her children to die, photographed by Emily Hobhouse The women are wonderful. They cry very little and never complain. The very magnitude of their sufferings, their indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears… only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out. Some people in town still assert that the Camp is a haven of bliss. I was at the camp to-day, and just in one little corner this is the sort of thing I found – The nurse, underfed and overworked, just sinking on to her bed, hardly able to hold herself up, after coping with some thirty typhoid and other patients, with only the untrained help of two Boer girls–cooking as well as nursing to do herself. Next tent, a six months’ baby gasping its life out on is mother’s knee. Two or three others drooping sick in that tent. Next, a girl of twenty-one lay dying on a stretcher. The father, a big, gentle Boer kneeling beside her; while,
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Glad to see you back here!