A Horror Story (true)

Let me introduce you to one of Joburg's creepier residents. The King Cricket, I believe originally a native of New Zealand that snuck into the country in a consignment of building sand, made itself at home and multiplied, greatly. It first reared its nodding little head in numbers in a suburb called Parktown, hence it's local name, the Parktown Prawn. This guy, the first I've seen now for some years, I found yesterday drowned in our swimming pool, a much more appealing discovery than some of the places P.P's have cropped up in days gone by.

In our previous house, we suffered a plague of them. They appeared climbing up curtains, grinding along your pillow, in every corner of every room, and worst of all, the telltale brown whiskers - if you were lucky - waved at you from under the rim of the toilet, warning you not to take that particular seat at that time. The shreiks and squeals they generated were quite out of proportion to their size, though their size, for an insect, is enormous - a bit bigger than how they appear on this page. The thought of their heavy, spiney bodies near your hair or neck or children was too awful to contemplate and the rasping military sound they made as they marched across the carpet could wake me from the deepest sleep to save my family from the beast.

A delightful trait it has when you try to corner or capture it, as soon as it becomes aware of your intentions, is to leap lumpily about, usually in your general direction and squirt a stream of foul-smelling black liquid from its rear end. The only way to catch it is to creep up from behind and grab one of its back legs - we had a special pair of long 'Prawn Tongs' for this purpose - which it somehow seemed oblivious to as you carried it gingerly to the loo and made triply sure it was well and truly flushed away - with a dose of Harpic for good measure.

The good news is, that just when we and all of Joburg were reaching hysteria about the Prawn problem, along came the Hadeda Ibises, flying in like avenging angels from the Eastern Cape. They found the P.P's delectable and gobbled and gobbled until now - a hapless prawn in the swimming pool is an oddity and becomes the subject of some detached sketching and reminiscing. Thank you dear big birds, your 4.30am siren call is forgiven.

Ink pencils for Spring

So off we went this morning, my ink pencils and I, to the dam (surprise, surprise!) and after a ten minute walk I found a spot where the rising sun didn't blind me and the tender new green outfits of the willows were on display. I scribbled and washed, scribbled and washed, getting some rather startling results as the water mixed with the crayon - dark areas went lighter and murkier, subtle blends became shockingly bright and garish - which really, those new leaves are, but are so tiny and delicate in nature that they don't look it - unlike when I try to paint them. So I'm not at all sure about the crayons... I liked the black one for this sketch of a hadeda who came with a friend for a bath right next to me... but the colours are very tricky to manage.
The birds flapped off squawking raucously, as they do, when a helicopter flew overhead. There is a joke that goes 'Why do hadedas make such a noise when they take off?'.... 'Because they're afraid of heights!' That struck me as enormously funny when I first heard it, but maybe you have to know them.

The Hadedas

This is specially for Gillian in Texas, whose birthday it is today... Happy Happy to you dear little sister!!... I couldn't believe when I was talking on the phone to her some years ago, she heard some of these birds squawking raucously in the background, and came over all emotional and homesick. The hadedas (Ibis) are the cause of much bleary-eyed cursing in this house as they land on the roof above our bedroom at a quarter to five in the morning, like sacks of cement, gedoenk, gedoenk, screeching their ear-splitting version of the dawn chorus - Haaaauuw, hhwaaaarrrr! They didn't use to live in Joburg - we first saw them in the eastern Cape and were quite enamoured of their shiny petrol coloured plumage and gawky gait. Then the city had a plague - an infestation, of the horrible 'Parktown Prawns' - a kind of king cricket, an import from New Zealand I believe, that had the population in skin-crawling hysteria for a while - we were very thankful when, after two or three years of terror, in flew the noble hadedas, feasting on the hideous jumping, stinking, grinding PP's (who had been feasting on the snails, which have resumed residence in their thousands this wet summer). Now we're left with the 'da's - I don't know what they eat, but I think they're very hungry, going by the arguments they hold in our garden over the compost heap. I guess I prefer them to the prawns.