Eating is Believing

  " Welcome" in both Lithuanian and Yiddish (or so we hope!) These 550+ days of lockdown has me obsessed about a few things: One of them   is  Making do The other is  thanking Gary Sussman  a million times And lastly, to keep on  looking for the spaces in between , the grey areas, the places where darkness and light might exist in the same spot. Places where the stereotype might be turned on its head.    Making do : This Heritage Weekend we visited The Farm again. Yes, that one. The one our friends left behind when they emigrated to England. We keep on thinking that it is  our farm , a humble farm with something like eight sheep and a small patch of mielies and a brick dam next to a decaying  kraal muur .  A make-do farm for a make-do travel through food club.  Last time we were there, there wasn’t any hot water, and we braved the outside shower. This time we made do. We stayed dirty.    We stayed dirty like our ...

Prayer flags, for our sanity and our country " Speak to us of good and evil.... Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. For what is evil, but good, tortured by its own  hunger and thirst?" Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet This blog is about pretending that things are okay, even if they are not. It is about imagining flight when you are stationary and bound, mostly to your own home. It is about escaping the harsh reality of feeling like a hostage of your own mind. If I could, I would have invited the whole of South Africa to this Lebanese feast. Because hell knows, we needed it.  I promised myself not to linger on reality, but I need to say that our country has just been through quite a harsh struggle. The looting and destruction of property last month showed political shades of grey we didn't even know existed. What was real? Who are we? Truth is, that no matter how you argue the unrest,  there were only losses, fear and the dismantling of the last little bits...

Front cover of The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston le Roux We were sitting under a billion stars when Rebecca told us she wanted to invite Gaston le Roux to the next Eating is Believing. He wrote The Phantom of the Opera (I found out later) and it is filled with gothic mystery, dank and dark dungeons and the love between Christine (an opera singer) and Erik (a phantom who initially appears as a ‘voice’)     I was excited about this, because it could be a gloomy Eating is Believing and a little on the horror side of things. Something we haven’t had before.   What I liked even more than the doom&gloom, was that Erik the ghost was actually just a deformed man, that had to hide from public view. My cup of tea for sure. I so wanted to write about the ghost we all fear, only to discover a darkness inside of us. A darkness we had to make peace with. My mind went wild, especially after I heard that there might even have been some real prisoners under the Parisian opera house. ...

Inviting the gorgeous Nico Tortorella and his Italian ancestors to our lunch would be easy to write about, so I thought. It was indeed a spectacular setting, and the lunch that went on for hours was like sitting in an old Italian village with people you love. Food, wine, music, deep thought, frivolous giggles and more food kept on rolling in. But to write about Nico and our conversation was hard. Mostly I think because I don't belong to Nico's world. I understand it, and love it, and will stand up for anyone who needs me, but it's not my battle. And so I tried writing about it humbly, over here:  Nico Tortorella with his Italian blood and our South African landscape The Threshold So, we all arrived on The Farm. The one that belong to our dear friends Catherine and Herman. (They had emigrated to the UK, but had left their little farm in South-Africa behind, like an orphan or a gemstone.) I’ve refused to go back there. Without Catherine who always put  stronke  in the old...