Eat my dust

I’m waiting in the Jo’burg airport, relaxing before my upcoming flight to London tonight, having survived the most hectic and fraught check-in, security, and immigration process. It is never easy here. Somehow the simplest things, like forming a queue, are just unimaginable to the masses of people shoving around. Makes you appreciate orderly Britain.

Let’s continue with the game park and our wonderful excursion there last weekend. After our lovely dinner under the stars on Friday evening, we were awake at dawn the next morning, having coffee and rusks on the veranda overlooking the watering hole. What is a rusk, you ask? Actually, in this case, it was a rather tasty muffin, but ordinarily rusks are those strange melba toast things that your aunt used to try to force on you.

“Oh, but Elinor Ann, they’re so delicious!”

“No thank you, Auntie. They taste like dust to me.”

And of course my mom chimes in with, “Since when have you been eating DUST?”

And she’s the one who told me, “You hafta eat a peck of dirt before you die.” It was supposed to be reassuring, meaning that germs are not such a big problem, because you’re ingesting them all the time. But the five-year-old in me was imagining someone sitting down out in the garden with a big basket of dirt, eating it, and then, naturally, keeling over dead. Such vivid, vibrant imagery. And all so strangely morbid.