Have You Got Mail?

There are a few things I don’t do anymore. I don’t do them because I can’t do them. It has nothing to do with my age, everything to do with the age we live in.

If I want to go to a drive-in…

to watch movies, I can’t. The majority of drive-ins went out of business decades ago. An abysmal simulation would be parking my car on a molehill in the garden and placing a big screen TV some distance away on a pedestal on the lawn. But what about the speaker? One of the best things about the drive-in was that moment when the window went down and the chunky speaker came in. And what about the flask of coffee and the sandwiches? And the swings embedded in the ground in front of the Tower-of-Babel humongous screen? How do you simulate that? Netties (pet name for Netflix) just doesn’t cut it, neither does a movie house.

Maybe, unbeknownst to me, drive-ins are making a comeback in South Africa?

Look at vinyl

Despite being booted out by CDs, records are still spinning ’round turntables, being needled, because melomaniacs won’t let them go. Thank goodness. I had someone to give my records to when I moved house some years ago. Just moved again, with three vinyls I lug around because I love the album sleeves too much and display them wherever I go.

And when last did you receive a physical, made-of-paper…

letter in the post?

The last item I took from a mailbox was a notice reminding me to renew my car licence. Now even that doesn’t come in the mail. Good thing it doesn’t. I don’t have a mailbox here. I’m not sure I have an address. Even Google struggles to name where we live – it finds us with a location pin, but it can’t pin an address on the map.

Sheep bleat a stone’s throw away from my bedroom window, cows graze across the road, hares (or are they rabbits?) rocket out of grasses when the dogs give chase. The boxer, Bailey, plunged through a gap in a fence to go tearing after a duiker, ignoring my recall. He came slinking home a few minutes later with a shamefaced grin on his cheeky chops – the duiker outran him and he was in the dogbox for disobedience.

We’ve almost tripped over small tortoises and bumped into big ones, snakes are making my eldest son very happy (he has a passion for them I cannot share), baboons abound (fortunately they have not come close), birds fly here, there and everywhere, and the wind whips its head around and howls

every

single

afternoon (thus far),

and I’m learning how to walk on stony, sloping earth without twisting an ankle.

Back to post

Thinking about how long ago it was since I received mail in the post got me thinking about postcards. Thinking about postcards gave me an idea. A-ha. I did something with the idea, and that something became The Porridge Postcard.

Have you got mail? Yes, you have. It’s not arriving by ship or plane or wagon or train or postman. The internet will deliver (have to work with what we’ve got hey).

I hope you enjoy the postcard. You’ll get a peek at our surrounds if that interests you.

Right now:

I must wrestle with twisted washing on the line without falling over (the wind is blasting) and without losing my hat to the pulverizing gusts;

I have a plaster over my nose as a last-ditch effort to fully protect it from the sun. I tell people I have a nose for vampires: it only comes out when the sun goes down 🤣;

and I want a cup of tea.

Toodle-oo (and a big kiss blown to you)

xxx ❤ PenMantis (Michele)