Branded Blog

On the way to a wedding up the West Coast this afternoon the Barefoot man (who has variously also been named the Barefoot Mountain Man; the Barefoot Runner; the Barefoot Minister, and – more often – “love”) and I were listening to an audio book by Bill Bryson about the history of private life called  “At Home”.

 Having moved into a monument status rectory in a little English village, he tells us, he was curious about the history of the house and in investigating was confronted with the idea that much of history is actually ordinary people carrying on with their ordinary lives, with short bursts of excitement in between in the form of wars, invasions, and the like. Most of history is actually about  normal people like us “eating, sleeping, having sex and endeavouring to amuse themselves.” Continue reading

Every morning (give or take a meeting or two), Phoebe-dog and I have a ritual. The barefoot man goes off to work at around 7am (he’s running an NGO in the mornings now – www.sdr.org.za) and then Phoebe-dog and I snuggle in bed (the only time she’s allowed on the bed), she has breakfast and then lies watchfully at the bedroom door while I get dressed and made-up and stuff. Because she knows that as soon as everything and everyone is tidy and ready to face the day, we get to go out the door, down the passage (which she does literally with a Foxy hop, skip & jump), down the stairs and into the complex garden which needs a key for that mysterious green lock.

Continue reading

We don’t get away very often, and the barefoot man has an interesting view on our lives – he thinks that we’ve shaped and chosen them quite carefully (now and through many trials by fire on both sides) and we find ourselves in a very special place – the place where you love so much about your life that you don’t really feel the need to take a break from it very often.

Continue reading

For the last 3 months we’ve been living on the side of a mountain that I’ve been taking photos of.

I’m not a photographer, despite having passed an undergrad course in photo-journ at varsity where the greatest praise I got was about my awesome choice of captions for my final course project. I kid you not. Words are my thing, photography with all it’s nuanced and technical wizardry blended into art, evidently was not.

Continue reading

Have you felt like jumping off a mountain recently?  It seems to be taking off.

Bad puns aside, I was catching up with an old school friend of mine recently, and it seems he’s taken to jumping off mountains (or high things at least, not sure how many mountains live in Umhlanga) in order to bring some of that elusive (and I think mostly illusory) balance-thing back to his life.

Continue reading