Sometimes, life hands us small, unsolvable mysteries. Like the one I encountered on a weekday visit to the beach.
Go to Muizenberg in Cape Town any weekend morning and you’ll see a group of women of a certain age, gathering to go bodyboarding or to swim in the sea.
I’m not one of those women. Just as I missed the memo on joining a book club, I missed the one on joining a bodyboarding group.
Not for want of trying – I did lessons with a group of women for a while, but financial constraints put paid to that.
Instead, I go to this particular beach, known as Surfers’ Corner, with my 22-year-old son. He surfs, I bodyboard. We take turns driving there and back, and with washing and hanging the wetsuits.
We usually do that on weekend mornings, but Jack’s shifts changed, and now he has Tuesdays and Wednesdays off.
Playing truant from my desk
So last week I took a deep breath, walked away from my Wednesday work diary and set off to misty Muizenberg with him.
Sadly, I didn’t go in the water. I’m on a break at the moment while I wait for my knee to recover from a minor op, so I walked along the sand with him and then back to our favourite beachfront spot, the Hang Ten Café.
The Hang Ten is a supreme place to sample Cape Town alternative culture: the vibe is relaxed, they keep surfers’ keys in a beaded bowl on the counter, the food offerings are vegetarian or vegan, there’s a resident dog called Peaches.
I sat at the counter at the window, gazed at the sea and did some writing in my journal over a cappuccino.
And became aware that gathering to my right hand side were a group of those boogie-boarding women, of a certain age and ethos familiar all over Cape Town.
These are people with interesting pasts, pillars of their various social circles, mothers and grandmothers. Middle class, respectable, and yet slightly eccentric.
When I walked past them to join my son as he returned from the sea, I was delighted (and a little surprised) to overhear this fragment of conversation:
“She wasn’t drinking, she was running a shebeen.”
What can it mean? Did I hear it right? Perhaps she was running a séance? A shindig? A singing group? And what does not drinking have to do with it?
Dear reader, I will never know. But I give you a morning at Muizenberg and a mystery.
Main picture: Muizenberg beach on September 10, taken on my walk back to the Hang Ten Cafe.
Note: Why is this a fragment? I write a personal blog post every two weeks, and quite often find myself casting around for something to write about. So I am trying something new: capturing things that I’m noticing, or feeling, or wrestling with, as I go along, and then turning those things into whatever takes my fancy. This week, that was this overheard remark. Next time, who knows!
Other things I have written
What I have learned while wearing a wetsuit – You can never be too old or too unglamorous to have fun. And you can shed your dignity in favour of spending time with your child.
Dinner, with a side order of story – What do human beings love most? Stories. It’s possible that I love them too much…
How to fail at being middle class – Being middle class is supposed to be a comfy, complacent sort of thing. But there are silent struggles everywhere you look.
Why where you live is less important than what you feel about it – Cape Town is South Africa’s oldest city, and one of the most socially stratified. So where you live is important – or perhaps not.
How can I help you make order from chaos?
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