New York New Year

We are in New York City for a short city break, staying in an elegant brownstone apartment in Stuyvesant Heights in the uber-trendy suburb of Brooklyn. We return at the weekend to our tiny, humid, scruffy dot in the Caribbean to resume 'normal' life - although it has to be said that this (ie NYC) feels more normal and that (the island) always feels slightly surreal and unwordly, even when living there.

I'm sure like many others, we do not like to feel or be seen as tourists, but as 'temporary residents'. As we play out our small fantasy here, my winter 'Paperwhite' narcissus, acquired at the Union Square Farmer's Market, sit on the windowsill which I'm desperate to flower before we return to the Tropics. We're mastering the subway, eating at local restaurants and did a marathon shop at the new Whole Foods in Gowantus, Brooklyn to stock up for the week. We're loving it.

After another intensely physical year of mothering three growing boys, playing pioneer and co-running an artisanal bakery start-up, I'm happy to be having a rather cerebral time of it here and have basically spent the past 24 hours doing little more than reading the New York Times from cover to cover (even the sports section) and Christopher Hitchen's memoir 'Hitch 22' which I have enjoyed immensely.

My primary new years resolution, apart from all the obvious (gym, wine, ciggies, swearing) is to resume some form of intellectual or intelligent life - that of beyond the day-to-day survival struggle which takes up all our time and energy and renders us myopic with exhaustion by the end of the day. I hope to be able to do some more writing and build yet more frontiers, through both travel and dare I say it, compromises. Well that's the plan anyway.

After a great Christmas Season in our little bakery, we are visiting as many bakeries here in New York as possible, to both 'self assess' ourselves as well as be inspired. It's a new form of market research, which we are enjoying with great alacrity and sense of purpose!

Our Christmas at home was quiet, with a lot of snoozing in amongst the nerf guns and 'lunch' at 6pm, followed almost immediately by bed. It was essentially a 'holding pattern' day as we traveled north shortly afterwards - although we enjoyed our own Christmas tree a lot more than the one at Rockefeller Plaza, which was shared with about 10,000 other 'temporary residents!'

Two weeks before Christmas

My gingerbread garland which lasted about an hour  

The mince pie-o-meter in the bakery is starting to climb steeply. Not only do we now have a driver who has immediately become indispensable, but we also have Mary who just focuses on sandwiches and mince pies. We've come a long way from last year.

My new years resolution is definitely to seek help around my Martha Stewart Type A tendencies, which are border-line masochistic when trying to run a commercial bakery.

I really needed to make the Donna Hay Gingerbread Men garland for our bakery Christmas decorations. No Kmart tinsel for us, thank you. Ours is from Anthropologie, no less. I simply cannot help myself.

So I did make the garland - about 5 times in the end. The first lot I burnt. The second lot fell to bits in the humidity and looked like a gingerbread massacre. The third lot got bumped and replaced. Once, twice and then finally thrown in the bin. Sigh.

It has also been a sad week: I've been baking at home with South African radio on, listening to all the tributes for Mandela and the nation in mourning. One never cries for just one loss - sadness seems to well up and accumulate - and so there have also been tears for my own family losses too.

Tuesday 10 December

This has all been interspersed, of course, with being insanely busy along with moments of feeling quite unhinged. I threatened to give the children away on BVI Bring & Buy, less I harmed them, and I also felt like I'd taken up the Japanese sport of motor car drifting as I screamed backwards & forwards up and down slippery, wet island hills - the Simon & Garfunkel "Slow down, you're going to fast di-di-di-deeeeee" song playing on a loop in my noisy head.

So, we're looking forward to a quiet family Christmas and a few days R & R in New York. Tyler has not been off-island for 2.5 years and we all need some bright city lights and someone else doing the cooking.

But until then, it's heads down for mince pies.

Legacy

It is really chilly here today and a good day for Remembrance & Reflection as the rain pours down and we get ready to trim the Christmas tree.

It's been a sad week with the death of Nelson Mandela.  I've done a lot of crying over the past few days as I've read the outpouring of emotion on Facebook, TV news and newspaper articles from around the world and in South Africa.

It aches to be so far away from home.

As I drove the kids to school on Friday morning, we were talking about Madiba and what he meant to all of us. The children have of course a fairly sanitized view of the whole thing and parrot off  about their hero whilst not having any real sense of the deep horrors of apartheid and the civil war waged to end it.

Like my father who reluctantly spoke about the Second World War, our generation doesn't talk much about 'The Struggle': Of Soweto 1976 and seeing children of one's own age being gunned down in the streets or witnessing families being forcibly removed from their homes in District 6 to be dumped in the sandy wastelands of the Cape Flats.

It was hard to explain to the boys the ludicrous concept of a "banned person" or how the majority of people in South Africa had absolutely no rights whatsoever and where laws institutionalized injustice and oppression.

As we talked in the car, I realized I was speaking Martian to the kids. Nothing can quite explain the traumatic experience of Neil Agget's funeral or the hauntingly, beautiful singing accompanying United Womans Organization's rallies or the terrifying knocks on doors in the middle of the night. It was a fearful, bloody rollercoaster ride of a time. It was our late teens and twenties and we were in the middle of it, with Mandela at the forefront.

Many years later, just after I returned to South Africa after 10 years of living in London, I was privileged to attend the opening of the Robben Island Museum. During the guided tour around the island, we stopped off to have cocktail snacks at the Old Prison Commanders House, an attractive sprawling Victorian manor with fabulous views over Table Bay towards Cape Town and Table Mountain.

It forcibly hit me as I sat there that this was the view that Nelson Mandela and his fellow prisoners must have looked at everyday for all those long years, which coincided with my own carefree years growing up in Cape Town.

Mandela was incarcerated on Robben Island when I was 2 years old and released 28 years later, when I was already living in London. He and his fellow prisoners must have watched Cape Town grow from their island prison: the multiplying harbour, the growing smog, the mushrooming skyscrapers and looping Foreshore  flyovers. They must have seen Tableview sprawl and the apartheid madness of Atlantis all from that close distance.

How incredibly cruel that must have been: To see but be excluded from everyday, normal life: Your families. Your kids. Your aging parents. Your colleagues from work. Your friends. Your life.

It is so notable that whilst Mandela was a politician first and foremost, he spoke so profoundly and wisely about the importance of living: Of making the most of your life.  Of being the best one can be. Of never giving up.

I feel this legacy so keenly, sitting on my own island now: That life is important, that we need to have a legacy and that we have to make a difference.

Nkosi Sikele Nelson Mandela. Thank you for your life.