The Restory Retreat Centre

  It is said that Calvin Coolidge, or Silent Cal, the 30 th  US president, didn’t work himself to a stanstill.    Taking into account that he generally slept 11 hours a night, supplemented by daily naps and some  three-month extended vacations, the conclusion that he worked a maximum of 4 and a half hours a day doesn’t seem too far-fetched. And the times he was in the Oval Office, he often pulled out  the bottom drawer of his desk, put his feet into it and counted the cars passing by on Pennsylvania Avenue.   When he passed away in 1933, Gertrude Stein reportedly remarked: “Coolidge dead? How can you tell?”   In 2 Kings 6 we are told of another leader, King Jehoram of Israel. With his city under siege by the Syrian army and Samaria experiencing a terrible famine, he walks on the  city wall. While doing so, he hears the horrific story of two mothers who started eating their children in an effort to stay alive. On hearing that he tear...

Liesbet Born: ?                   Arrived: 2 December 1999                Died: 5 January 2013 When I wrote about her on the blog in November 2011 in  Liesbet , I was already writing about this. But on the day, it remains difficult writing about this. She left the way she came – in a soft drizzle. Somehow it is a deep comfort to me. That was apparently her cue to enter and leave the stage of my life. For the last few days I knew the inevitable had to be done. With great difficulty she tried to follow me wherever I went, she ate her food lying down, she was just the image of frailty and age. By yesterday afternoon I realised it could no longer be postponed. The spot that I chose for her grave is under one of the big plane trees at the back of my house. It is cool and shady there. It also provided some...

In South Africa we call a small pickup a “bakkie”. It is an Afrikaans word that actually means a small bowl. You’ll give milk to a kitten or a puppy in a “bakkie”. How exactly it came to be used for this type of vehicle I don’t know. In our country with its 11 official languages, we borrow and mingle. Some words we don’t translate. We just use them “voetstoots”. As is. So, whether you’re English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, you’ll call any small pickup more or less up to a one tunner a bakkie. Thereafter it is a truck or a lorry. Were you to emigrate to another country you might find fairly similar vehicles, but you would miss using the word. There’s just nothing like a bakkie. And among bakkies there are Bakkies. Legends. You can get them only second hand. Or steal them. They’ve earned their reputation through years of use and reliability.  Driving one of them you get used to people walking around them, admiring them, kicking one of the tyres saying: “They don’t make them like...