You're having a giraffe.

Gosh hello November, where the hell did you come from?  It’s how many days till Christmas? You’re having a giraffe*

 (*Aka Tin Bath i.e. laugh for those unfamiliar with cockney rhyming slang).

Somehow weeks have passed me by and all I have to show for it is a penchant for animal print in the form of an Ocelot print faux fur coat that I have taken to wearing in and outside the house in the manner of ageing rock star/drunken lush. 

The obligatory selfie

Oh and Vanny turned 94! To celebrate I brought her a cheese baker (basically a ceramic heat proof dish in which an entire block of camembert can be melted, for the purpose of dipping foodstuffs into melted cheese).  She was delighted, as it will enable us to really focus our smelly French cheese obsession in a new direction.  Unfortunately her daughter bought her new bathroom scales for her birthday, as the old one’s were out by a good 2kg.  The new digital bathroom scales are so frighteningly accurate that Vanny and I have a renewed fear of ‘gaining’, so much so that the cheese baker remains untouched. Ignorance really was bliss.

As part of her birthday celebration she and I ventured to London to watch ‘War Horse’, which was epic and emotional – the fat man next to me was in a flood of tears by the end, sobbing like a little girl and the teenage girls further down our row where flapping their hands about air drying their tears in the manner of beauty pageant contestants.  Frighteningly Vanny and I remained rather dry eyed.  She thinks she is becoming hardened at 94, I think I’ve used up a life time supply of tears recently and am physically unable to produce more. 

I was thoroughly impressed that the puppetry behind War Horse is created by the Handspring Puppet Company, who are proudly South African.   Shall attach a little preview for any culture vultures interested…

To further increase our cultural kudos I took Vanny to see the filmed live-version of the National Theatre production of Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein that was being broadcast at our local cinema (which was fantastic!).  When we parked the car I noticed to young 20-something girls pull in and park in a disabled only spot and here I found myself saying the most remarkable things:

Me: Look at that Vanny.  Do either of those girls look disabled to you? [Watch 2 able bodied 20 year olds saunter past flicking youthful long hair over their shoulders.]

Vanny: Well, no, why?

Me: They parked in the disabled space. I very much doubt that they are going to watch our show – I’m assuming their cultural literacy is very low if they behave like that.

Vanny: Chuckles.

Me: Wow, listen to me all judgmental.  I really have turned into ‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’.  It must be an age thing.  That really would not have bothered me a few years ago.

Vanny: Just you wait, if you’re so incensed now, when you’re my age you’ll be chasing them back to their car with a walking stick.

Vanny is right of course, I’m on a slippery slope to crotchety old chicken lady-dom.  I the middle-class Britishness of my surroundings is starting to take its toll. The Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells reference is a local British joke that inevitably a complaint letter in a UK paper was often written by a disgruntled member of the middle-classes and signed, “Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells”. A case in point the other day I came home to find that someone had parked in the disabled spot outside our house specially reserved for Vanny.  One of neighbours had been so incensed by this violation that they taken the time to write this, A4 sized note, and sellotape it across the offender's windscreen:

My only criticism of this note would be the complete lack of punctuation.  This blatant disregard for the rules of grammar is the thin end of the wedge as far as I am concerned.

Of course the other great news in my life is that I have been accepted into the post-grad Copywriting course starting next January in Cape Town.  Which means I am going to be a penniless student (again) in one of the coolest cities on earth.  My classmates will all be a good 10 years younger than me and probably be so achingly hip that they will no doubt be speaking a foreign language to me.  I’ll be as uncool as their mothers trying to fit ‘amazeballs’, ‘totes’ and ‘obvs’ into conversation.  Still it will give me a chance to put on my Ocelot coat and get my cougar on by pursuing younger toy boys, as it seems to me that a penchant for animal print is a frightening predictor of cougar type tendencies later in life.

-Disgusted (but totes amazeballs, in an Ocelot coat), Tunbridge Wells.