Second thoughts

“My next blog is going to be about my kids”, I confidently declared. Or not. I quickly discovered that it is not so easy to condense 18 and 14 years respectively into blog posts… and certainly not at the breezy pace I had envisaged. The first stumbling block was the fact that 10 and 6 years (again respectively) of my children’s lives were captured on film… with negatives kind-of-film. These were at least neatly stored in separate envelopes, but the ‘convenience’ stopped right there. Sifting through them is obviously not as easy as with the large-medium-small thumbnails available for the digital counterparts. The real time thief, however, is deciding which of the photographs dotted along memory lane contain the highlights and also how the alphabet soup should be arranged to best capture their personalities. So the long and short is that I’m putting in the time, persevering, but that the final products are still in the making. Coming in 2013 to a blog spot near you ….

Speaking of perseverance, it reminded me of an evening a few years back when our good friends Johan and Laetitia were visiting and we decided to have a góód bottle of red wine. Wessel dug into the stash of bottles reserved for special occasions and triumphantly held up a respectable 1974, both in brand and variety. Unfortunately, the proof of the grape was a rather sour affair and we promptly moved on to a similarly respectable 1981. Alas. After that, we valiantly opened bottles spanning a few more decades until, in pure desperation, we opened a 5 minute old red. Palatable, but definitely not the smooth, velvety, well matured wine we envisaged at the start of our little adventure. 


I learnt three things. The first is that wine storage requires more attention and science than ‘just stacking’ allows for. The second is that the quality of friends to share fun moments with is far more valuable than the quality of the wine. The third is that we should not wait for special occasions, but to create them. Live a little! You may otherwise waste the opportunties held in 7 (!) good bottles of wine...