Of frozen prawns, fake orgasms and the Dalai Lama

This week we celebrated the Swedish National Day which is also the Day of the Pickled Herring. After 500 years the Swedes have not really defined themselves as a nation and have not learned how to commemorate nationality. These things take time and can not be speeded up by anything except maybe a war or a mass murder. The last war was 200 years ago and the last mass murder happened recently but in the country next door. One can correctly assume that the Swedes are a peace loving nation, and so was my third husband.

We met on a skiing holiday in Switzerland and when I watched him through the bottom of a bottle of red wine I liked what I saw.

When it was time for my 40th birthday I decided to soften the blow by majestically sweeping down the aisle in a white dress. Writing about my third wedding reminded me of an old joke.What is the difference between a Jewish woman and and an Afrikaans woman? A Jewish woman wears real jewellery and has fake orgasms. The dress and a lot of fake silver jewellery was bought at an Indian shop in down town Pietermaritzburg.

After a while the birthday and the white dress was forgotten and the marriage and the silver jewellery began to tarnish. I was getting really bored. Husband number three never talked and never showed emotion. Being married to him was like seeing a movie without the sound track.

I would be met with the same response whether I asked him to pass the salt or whether I told him that the man next door had just killed his wife and that her blood was running into my gin and tonic.

His facial expressions would vary from that of a frozen prawn to that of a frozen prawn. Albeit an attractive frozen prawn.

I never felt special because he would treat everybody the same. No difference if you were to be the taxi driver, the cashier, the next door neighbour, his mother, the Dalai Lama, a beggar on the street, the cleaning lady, the pope or me. This would work excellently if you were Jesus or Mother Theresa but not in a marriage to an attention seeking creature like me.

I asked for a divorce and he said nothing.

Now I need something to soften the blow of my looming 50th birthday. I don't know what I will do yet but I do know that herrings are not happy on national day.

Of pigs, parasites and plastic bags

‘Men at a conference will fuck anything, even a pig’. This is not the famous words of Oscar Wilde, but a rather typical statement of my second ex-husband. That could be one of the reasons why he has that title.

Scientists tells us that philandering is wired into our genes. It is a natural force in all living species. Even pigs. There is only one monogamous species, which is a parasite in fish intestines called Diplozoon Paradoxum. The reason why they stay together is because the male and female fuse together during adolescence and have to stay like that until death do them part.

My second marriage started at the Perseverance Tavern in Cape Town, ten years and more than ten boyfriends after the first one. This time it was a 1.97cm sexy blonde Swede. It was not long before I walked down the aisle again. We didn’t have money for a church organist so my sister carried a musical wedding card with an electronic version of Wagner's wedding march behind us. The priest was not impressed but he realised that this wasn’t the royal wedding and a few minutes later the new bride was kissed.

Ten months later and heavily pregnant the alliance bought me to Sweden where the big adventure and big nightmare of life as an ex pat on a freezing sub-continent started. By now the 1.97m Swede had lost most of his sex appeal. Money issues were dire.

When the first birth pains started, the proud grandfather to be gave us 100 Swedish Kronor for a taxi fare home. A child was born. The 1.97cm Swede thought it was a much better idea to use the 100 Swedish Kronor for alcoholic beverages. It was in the middle of the summer and maybe he was thirsty. Prams were also not a part of his beliefs. Thus the baby was carried home by bus in a plastic Pep Stores bag (systembolagspåse). Needless to say, the new mother was not too impressed. Not long afterwards I found myself single again.

The past week I spent at our annual Nordic MRI conference and as usual I looked around for telltales of extracurricular activities and pigs. Of the former there were plenty. But pigs? Only bacon on the breakfast buffet. The salami were hidden.

Of topless tanning, red dresses and penis desensitising cream

"A wedding is a funeral where you smell your own flowers."
-- Eddie Cantor

Not that I want a grave but if I had one the epitaph should be ‘Three weddings and one funeral’. There has been three weddings and no funeral so far. The first started and ended on Mauritius. He was a Boer from Bloemfontein and I was an impressionable 19 year old from Greytown.

I was not too impressed when he on the night of the honeymoon pulled out a tube of penis desensitising cream from his beauty box. It was still the early days of my sexual sophistication and it freaked me out a bit.

The next day it was time for him to freak out over me tanning topless on the white beaches of Club Med. A clash of the titans started. Then there was the incident of the red mini dress. He wouldn’t let me wear it and subsequently carried me to the bathroom where he threw me in the bathtub to wet the dress so that I could’t wear it. The dress was of course even more sexy after that. Water does that to dresses.The honeymoon went down the drain together with the bath water.

Back in South Africa I started to make plans to end the alliance. I hated his flat which was furnished in all the shades of brown known to mankind and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. When I fetched my lipstick, a shade of pink, and a few other last possessions, my sister stuck the penis cream on the outside of his front door.

The last time I saw husband number one was when he gave me and Valerie, a fellow student and my best friend from Addington Hospital, a lift to Greytown. He was moving to Bloemfontein where he was going to live happily ever after with his mother. We said goodbye and I cried crocodile tears. Finally we saw the tail lights of his Mazda 323 disappearing around the street corner and Valerie, my sister and I held hands and danced with joy. I was the happiest 19 year old divorcee on earth. Then I turned into the most embarrassed 19 year old on earth when we saw the front of his Mazda 323 appearing again. We froze like the proverbial deer in front of headlights. He had forgotten the wedding ring which he was going to give to his mother. I never saw him again. The engagement ring was sold to Valerie and I used the money to finance a philosophy course at UNISA. Blood money.

Still wearing red mini dresses

Of rattling bones, mice and golden drops

Tolstoy, in his book ‘A Confession’ tells a Russian fable about a man who jumps into a well because he is chased by a monster. Whilst jumping he happens to notice a furious dragon at the bottom. Luckily there is a branch sticking out of the wall and he grabs it, dangling out of reach from both the dragon and the monster. But now he sees another problem. Two mice are enjoying their evening supper and the main course is the branch. Soon they will eat through the branch, and the man will fall. Suddenly things get better, he notices something else. At the end of the branch he sees a few golden drops of honey. The man licks the honey. According to Tolstoy this is our predicament. We are the man hanging from the branch. Death threatens from all sides. We can not escape, but we can lick whatever honey we can reach.

As we know in life, all golden drops are not honey. Years ago I had the unfortunate urge to run the Comrades Marathon (90km) which I managed to complete by the skin of my teeth. Not many women were into that sort of recreation in those years and I found myself surrounded by thousands of men, which I liked and no ladies room, which I didn’t like. After the start of the race it became time for desperate measures. I the early morning mist I suddenly saw paradise. The Pietermaritzburg grave yard. I ran behind the biggest grave stone I could find and deposited something that was not honey. My co-runner, Neil Hinrichsen asked: “Was it a man’s grave? That would put some rattling in the old bones.” It was in the wee hours of the race and Neil could still talk.

I know of some more rattling bones, but not quite for the same reason. My father had a charismatic friend in Greytown who sadly lived and died as an alcoholic. Much to his joy his mother in law finally passed away. It was near the end of the month and money matters were in dire straits. When he received cash from his sister to buy flowers for the grave, he and my father did a beeline for the nearest pub. Hours later and broke again, they drove to her grave where he delivered the wreath in foamy liquid form. Those golden drops were neither honey nor tears.

Of Danes, cat’s asses and golden teeth

This week I’m working at the hospital in Lund which is a small university town on the southern shores of Sweden. On the other side of the sea one may wave to happy Danish people. It is a well known fact that Danes have more fun than Swedes. Or is it blondes? Danish blondes? The sea separating the happy and less happy people is called Kattegat. (Wat daardie kat geeët het om 'n see na hom te laat vernoem sal ek graag wil weet.)

On my way to work I have to pass through the Lund grave yard, where the overflow from the hospital ends up. I work civilized hours so my journey to and fro is in broad day light and I see many graves but luckily no ghosts except the ones from the past.

My great grandmother was obsessed with graves. She kept our family graveyard in pristine condition. Her grave and stone was prepared long before she died. It had cost her more than my grave. Which is impressing because a bottle of gin bought in Sweden costs more than a small African country. My father has no fear for the devil or the dead and he buried her in the neatly prepared grave but never bothered to engrave the date of her departure. If she knew this she would be turning over in her grave like the leaves of a book.

The family farm has now been claimed by the Zulus and the graves are now a playground of weeds, erosion and decay. The worms are probably keeping better order six feet under. The last I heard was that my great grandmothers grave had been dug up by vagrants looking for golden teeth or wedding rings. She probably interfered from beneath or above because something scared them away before the job was done. Maybe they were kicked by a donkey. Now she is only three feet under with teeth still intact.
Who wants to join me to bury her again? Champagne on the house?

                         My great grandmother inspecting her grave with one of her six servants.

Of donkeys, gin and stiffness.

If I die in Sweden my son will smuggle my ashes to South Africa and strew them on the Salt Rock Beach. How he will manage that is still unclear but I imagine that I will fit very snugly in a bottle of gin. Preferably Bombay Sapphire; The colour blue will set off my ashes beautifully.

I do not wish to be buried in a frozen grave. I froze enough during life. In after life I will probably be reincarnated as a donkey. The donkey will like the Kingdom of Sweden even less than me. Donkeys are not my favourite animal, rabbits are, but I think some of my friends will certainly wake up as donkeys. Some have done that already and not all them because of their anatomy.

Having said that about death, the present is finding me as stiff as a corpse but still very much alive and kicking. That would be because of my close encounters with a girja, which is Russian for kettle bell, which is English for torture. My one weighs 4kg and is round and cold and hard. I would have preferred pink, but couldn’t wait for the Laura Ashly edition. This kettle bell is presumably going to make me muscular, fit and steaming hot. I know that because I watched the mother of all kettle bells on YouTube, Pavel Tsatsouline and he is muscular, fit and steaming hot.

The reason why I am suddenly into kettle bells, is that I washed and polished my car for 3 hours the other day and realized that my arms are as weak as over cooked spaghetti. That stiffness had to be rectified by a Thai massage. In retrospect it would have been cheaper to pay a machine to wash my car. Much cheaper than a massage and a kettle bell.

The girja