luurve, thar she blows

It’s been a while, I know. Fortunately I am not paid to yerble on about my life and so I get to post when I feel moved to do so. And I do it purely dear reader, and entirely, for luurve.

Ah yes.
Luurve.

Yesterday in Clarens I wander into a shop selling herbal unguents and oils. There is a large sofa against the wall. I like a shop with a sofa. It says, this not really a place of trade, of mere buying and selling. This is a stopping-off place, a place where you can learn something. A place where you can try the wares and, if you’re lucky, meet outlandish people who have a yarn to tell.

On the sofa a smiling oldish man in shorts and sandals and bare skinny legs with dry skin watches who comes and who goes. A very pretty shop assistant looks up from her painting at the till then goes on with her art. Big glass bottles with brass taps gleam with oils yellowgreen, rose and ochre.

“You’re Edmund Cressy,” I say to the man.
He leans back and his smile doesn’t change.
“That’s right. And you’re … wait, I know your face...”
Pretty soon we’ve figured out who we know in common.
Old timers from along the Lesotho border, we two.
He has an antique water mill on his farm nearby.
“Works every day” he says. It’s featured in a coffee table book about mills. “Look” he says and shows me the page. “But I’m bored of it. Divorce is a terrible thing. You divorced?”
Before I have to answer he plunges on without me.
“M'wife left and took the kids to Majorca.”
Kids? He’s 65 at least.
“Oh,” I say, putting my feet carefully nowhere near my mouth.

He sells me a bottle of organic rosehip oil (good for skin). In my hand he places some roots that look like shrivelled apricots left out too long and a sheaf of brochures about the organically grown medicinal plants he produces. Sausage tree and helichrysum and pelargonium. All cures for something.

“I stopped her spending R1500 a day.” He narrows his eyes at the golden hill visible in the doorway behind my shoulder. “I started to hate her for it.”
I clutch my dried roots, my bottle of precious oil.
“Had a good offer for the farm. Might take the yacht and go to St Helena.”
Up prick my ears.
I remember hearing about him years ago when I lived around these parts. Hearsay is he made and lost his millions buying old shipwreck sites unseen and roaming the oceans hunting sunken treasure.
“Bought the rubbish dump for a pound few years ago. Might sell the farm. Go salvage the bottles.”
“Napoleon’s?” I see him aboard a schooner with white sails and a tanned, young, freewheeling crew, their sun bleached hair tousled by the wind.
“He was allowed six bottles a day. Vineyard in the Cape. They might buy them off me.”
He smiles at me.
“I think I will sell. Vanish for while.”

Now why does that sound so compelling?