How many Christmas cards did you get this year? I mean the genuine analogue kind: a festive card sealed in an envelope and delivered by the postman/person. Fewer than last year, I’d guess – and maybe a lot fewer than five or 10 years ago.
If you received one from Roy and Verne, custom-designed and postmarked Singapore, I must confess it had little to do with me. I would have joined the rest of the world and given up on this particular chore a long time ago. Roy, however, is not only CEO of household administration, but also a staunch traditionalist*.
* A jolly good thing when it comes to platinum wedding anniversaries and such. Roy has never forgotten our anniversary. When I did, once – around 15 years ago? – I was allowed to live, perhaps only so as to rue that dark day for the rest of my life.
Plenty. Durban has quite enough to keep me busy, and that’s the truth.
By comparison to my home town, Singapore is a major world city that offers just about every entertainment you could possibly think of – everything from world-class concerts and exhibitions to international sports events and more. New restaurants of every level and description, from hawker stalls where a meal costs around US$3 to global celebrity chef restaurants where you’ll easily pay $200 or even $300 a head. So, after our nearly 16 years in this amazing metropolis, am I missing all that? No, not really.
The 5-star Oyster Box in Umhlanga Rockshas a selection of more-or-less fancy restaurants, including the Lighthouse Bar – and no, it’s not actually in the lighthouse itself
As Roy and I prepared to head off to Modimolle in Limpopo Province (previously Nylstroom in the Northern Transvaal) for Mathilda and Leon’s hugely enjoyable wedding a few weeks ago, I found myself questioning my cultural identity as an “English” South African. What does that strange expression even mean?
For white, English-speaking Durbanites, an invisible yet undeniable divide lies to the west of us – somewhere between 100 and 200 kilometres, I reckon – that separates us from the mainly Afrikaner hinterland. Julie Simpson calls it “the boerewors curtain”. (That’s why the Limpopo game-farm buck in the photo look so nervous; they know they’re only a stage away from biltong.)
There are occasions – even for a generally unholy lot like us – when it seems that only a church will do. For those times, our venerable institution of choice is the Parish Church of St Peter in Coughton, Warwickshire.
St Peter’s was where Roy’s sister Lyndsay wedded John Clemmow more than 30 years ago – both Lyndsay and her sister Cheryll had sung in its church choir – and it was there that our daughter, Wendy, was christened in 1980.
Can you even remember what we did before TripAdvisor and Booking.com? – and one has to wonder, how did small, good hostelries get the promotion they deserved? A case in point is 44 on Ennis, where we spent one night en route to a wedding in Modimolle (previously Nylstroom).
Though it’s my first visit to Ermelo – and probably the last, to be honest – I do have a link to the area. My maternal grandmother, Christina Painter, née Louwrens (“Stienie” to her peers, “Ma” to us), grew up on a farm in nearby Amsterdam in the early 1900s, along with 12 older siblings, before her parents retired to the small town of Newcastle in what is now KwaZulu-Natal. So I was keen on visiting Amsterdam (around 77km from Ermelo), but our B&B host, Peter Maherry, most earnestly advised us not to; it has a church, a liquor store and one stop street, he warned; “You will be disappointed.”
This is the only photograph I have of my maternal grandmother as a young woman; she grew up on a farm in Amsterdam, near Ermelo. This was taken circa 1931 with my grandfather, Jack Painter
Peter and his wife, Nikki, built the place themselves about six-and-a-half years ago. It’s a pleasing hotchpotch of pebbles – lots of pebbles! – slate, tile and glass mosaic; she’s an artist, and all the paintings are her work.
Apart from the food, it’s the extraordinary intimacy of Peter and Nikki’s service that makes 44 on Ennis so memorable. After pre-dinner drinks with several other guests in front of a cosy fire in the courtyard, the couple cook and serve everything themselves from a short but interesting menu that changes every two days.
Sanele (right) came to 44 on Ennis as an accountant, but soon developed a passion for the kitchen – and for customer service, says PeterThere’s nothing like a sundowner G&T in front of a crackling fire
Eating
My super-thick fillet of beef tenderloin (R189, US$14) is cooked directly on the courtyard fire along with its coal-baked jacket potato, and comes perfectly medium rare, just as ordered. Roy’s kingklip* (R220) is baked to just-done perfection in the West Coast oven – similar to a pizza oven, and built around a 50-gallon drum – that is Peter’s latest baby. Both dishes come with a gorgeously rich tagine of mixed vegetables. (Other main course options include an innovative rooibos-smoked sole, and flame-grilled prawns.)
*Kingklip is a distinctive local fish, a member of the eel family, that was virtually fished out for a couple of decades before it made its recent comeback to sustainability
All the artwork is by Nikki
I photograph food only in daylight – it tends to look drecky otherwise, unless you’ve got proper lighting equipment. So you’ll have to be content with this breakfast photo (below): poached eggs, bobotie (a traditional South African-Malay dish of minced meat, onions and breadcrumbs flavoured with dried fruit and spices and baked with a creamy egg topping) and baked beans with fresh basil. Splendid!
For breakfast, you “build your own feast” – mine is poached eggs, bobotie, and baked beans with fresh basil
Accommodation
A big, comfortable room with two beds; perfect for the partners of blanket-hoggers
Our spacious room (number 4) had two double beds, a proper wardrobe, two comfortable armchairs, a desk and a shower-room. The free Wi-Fi worked well, including in our room. Maintenance could be improved, however: non-functional electric adaptors fixed or replaced; noisy plumbing attended to, and loose tap fittings made secure. Air-conditioning would be nice, and we’d also suggest thicker curtains to block out the bright security lights outside.
Value
Excellent: R625 (US$45) for the room; R750 for our G&Ts, two courses each and a nice bottle of red; and R75 for two breakfasts!
If you cannot finish your enormous fillet tenderloin, never mind – Lyla will have the rest for breakfast
It doesn’t look as if we’ll make it up to Mozambique this time round, but we did go for lunch at Mo-Zam-Bik in Florida Road with my mother and BFF Julie Simpson. One of a chain of pleasant-but-not-great “family restaurants”, it’s down the same alleyway where the great Gaby’s Portuguese restaurant used to be.
Sheila Maree, Julie Simpson, me and Roy having lunch at Moz-Am-Bik in Florida Road, Durban
Last Sunday, Roy’s sister Lyndsay Clemmow and her husband, John, brought their mother, Leila Titchmarsh (93), to have lunch with us on Karanja. Marianne and Phil came down from Welford-on-Avon, too.
Though we’d been keeping Leila up-to-date with our barging exploits and shown her all the photos, it’s never the same as actually seeing it for yourself, is it? In the end, though we’d been unsure about how difficult boarding the boat might be, it was no problem.
Marianne, Phil and Roy
Leila, Lyndsay and John arriving
Lyndsay a-cruising
Stripes all round
Colour-coded crew
Did they get the dress-code memo?
The weather could have been warmer, but it was good enough to allow for a short cruise up and down the Thames.
It’s a single, honest!
Not missing a single thing
Not only did Leila stand up next to Roy at the wheel for a better view, but after lunch she also managed to negotiate the fairly steep steps from the wheelhouse into the saloon. Thank you, everyone, for a lovely and most satisfactory day – especially the appointed (press-ganged?) drivers, John and Phil, who forwent champagne in favour of coffee. Nespresso, yes, but still.
Though it might seem cheeky to review one’s brother-in-law’s paella, I give it five stars. Lyndsay and John host a giant paella party every summer, and this year it coincided with the 30th birthday of their twins, Charlie and Hannah, on Sunday, 31 July.
On Friday, therefore, Uncle Roy and I locked up the boat, headed off from Thames & Kennet marina and checked in at The Arrow Mill for the weekend (reviewed in my 13 July blog). We’d had car trouble again with the new Renault Twingo, but our incredibly generous marina neighbours, Kenny and Heather, lent us their Volvo convertible for the trip.
On the back terrace of Lynt and John’s house – a house that has seen some spectacular parties in its time – four generations celebrated the twins’ birthday together: from Roy’s mum, Leila (93), to a fast-growing brood of great-grandchildren whose names I will not list here, for fear of leaving out a name and offending its parent forever.
