I'm feeling quite melancholy this evening. Some friends of ours are relocating to Joburg this week, and while there's been much talk of keeping in touch and getting together in the future, there's no denying that it just won't be the same. Friends you occasionally meet up with once or twice a year just aren't the same as friends you can pop over to for coffee or go out to dinner with - just because. They have three children - the older two girls and the youngest a boy, just like us. The girls were here this morning while their mom and dad were finishing the packing. It was sad saying goodbye. It doesn't get any easier, saying goodbye to friends who are moving on. Maybe in fact it's because it's happened to us several times before that we find it harder than we used to - knowing what it's like to lose people, knowing how much we've missed people who've left in the past.

Anyway, enough self-indulgent feeling sorry for myself I suppose. I guess I should feel glad that in the last couple of years we have been able to make friends that we'll miss that much.

Otherwise, so far the holidays are going well. I've had all sorts of trouble blogging but it's not been due to either stress or gloom. There seem to have been problems at Blogger, and we have also recently changed our connectivity at home. Peter has given me various incomprehensible explanations containing terms such as 'proxies' and 'cookies'. All a bit of a mystery to me. Hopefully this post will go through.

Highlights of the last few days:

Wednesday: Trip to Maritzburg Botanic Gardens with my parents. (Remember the lake? It's in the process of being turned into a wetland.) Lots of bike-riding (kids), bike-chasing (us), failing to keep up with and temporary losing of bike-riders (us), and ice-cream eating (all of us). Lauren was only seen from time to time as she spent the entire day zipping around the park and mastering the art of getting started on her bike without a push (more difficult with a pedal-brake bike as you can't wind the pedals backwards into a good position).

Thursday night: (Definitely more of a highlight for the kids than for us.) Annual traditional visit to Uncle Jumbo's Christmas Party, which is a thing put on by Round Table for the kids of Kloof featuring kids favourite characters and a visit from Father Christmas who dishes out presents to all the kids. Proceeds go to charity and guests are also requested to bring toys or blankets or food for the underprivileged. In our family, 'Father Christmas' supplied new computer games for the girls and a Batman suit for Danny. He is the most adorable Batman in the world, and has a very stylish cape-twirling move.

Friday: Visit to the beach with another family (well, both families were in fact minus dads for the day) - paddling and digging in the sand for the kids, more bike-riding afterwards along the walk adjacent to the beach, finishing up with ice-creams for all. Robyn had her biggest bike brake-through moment and mastered self-starting (and also crashing). She was immensely proud of herself. Physically tough and challenging stuff is most definitely not her forte. However, she views each successive bike crash as evidence of her new riding prowess. Today she rode into the pool and I had to rescue her from the pool net.

Friday night: Dinner out with friends (including the couple relocating to Joburg, and another couple) while the kids stayed at home with their grandparents. Drinking too much and getting very silly and raucous. My liver seems to be realising it is 35 years old. Either that or I react particularly badly to red wine, which I never used to drink because I didn't like it. But which I now like, and hence drink. Probably because we have so much more money now and can afford to drink red wine which doesn't taste like something the cat did. I was a little shocked to realise that the wine I had ordered had a price tag of R90 a bottle. Of which we had two. Bottles that is. Urp.

Saturday morning: Attending a meeting of the important-sounding South African Writers Circle at the Westville Library with Rosanne from my writing group who asked me to go along to keep her company as she was also attending for the first time. It was a rather non-typical end of year do, so it was hard to judge what the monthly meetings would normally be like. Also I had to leave before the end to attend something else in Maritzburg. I think I will go to at least a few meetings to see if it appeals to me. Rosanne and I had the (mis)fortune, while we were there, to be photographed by a reporter from the local community newspaper. Hopefully the photo will not make it into print, as attending something called the South African Writers Circle kind of implies that one can, in fact, write. We giggled a bit, because although we were visitors we were asked to be in one of the pictures to give the SAWC a younger face. Yes, younger.

The saga with Angie, that I thought was at least partially resolved until February, became apparently very un-resolved on Friday. After returning to work on Tuesday and making the decision to cut back to three days a week, Angie came on Friday and was hobbling around clearly in a great deal of pain. To cut a long story short, she has most probably retired. She is currently taking her three weeks leave and will receive her December pay and 13th cheque, and then in January or February I think we will have no option other than to offer one of her daughters a job and hope like hell it works out. Not to do so would be to feel responsible for her family being totally without income.

So for the first time in seven years I am totally on my own at home trying to keep the house and laundry at least partially under control. Even during Angie's leave in previous years she always asked to come in once a week for extra money. I find I have no idea of what sort of cleaning schedule I should be aiming for in order to keep the house acceptably clean and yet not spend every waking hour on domestic chores. A family of five people and three animals in a suburban house with garden and pool is a far cry from a tiny third-floor flat with two adults and a baby. In a way I actually really like us having the house to ourselves. It's far more relaxing not having people employed in your home. But the accumulating grime is most definitely not relaxing.

Oh, a closing note. Peter and Robyn were talking the other day about how words are used differently, and have different meanings, in different countries. For example, he said, in America the fanny is at the back, not the front. This was the cause of some interest to Robyn, who thought he meant Americans were actually made differently. You know, with their fannies at the back.