Green. Bath. Bliss.

So much I want to say as I research the topic of waste while keeping a beady eye on watery matters. Have been trying to write a blog for weeks and it keeps turning into patchwork. Or a wildly messy tapestry of one unfinished thread after another. This is not a bad reflection of my current reality, as one of the internet rabbit-holes my research has had me plunge into is the world of sewing as a form of re-using and recycling (not to mention creativity). Who knew there were that many Facebook groups just on making one’s own clothes? And that’s just one teeny aspect of a massive global culture of mending and making do, of off-grid and zero-waste living. There are tens of thousands of tips out there!

So let me step back, take a breath and say this: haven’t the winter rains in the Western Cape been a benison? I only wish more would fall in the still drought-stricken Karoo and Eastern Cape. The rainfall here these last two months has been average only, for this time of year, but it’s been exactly the right kind of rain: frequent, soft, soaking, and even a little in the form of snow — good for restoring groundwater and slow run-off.

I’m trying not to get too comfortable — the grand-daddy of Cape Town’s dams, Theewaterskloof, is still only 54% full, but the others are literally brimming. We have enough to get through the summer (including the agricultural sector, which has taken a hammering), although for complete comfort we need the dams another 5% full. But no exhaling yet: we have enough for THIS SUMMER. That’s it. None of the water-wise skills learned by Cape Town’s comfortable classes will be wasted (ha), as we have no idea what the future holds — but we have learned how vulnerable we are — and also, how quickly we can adapt. That’s going to be useful.

But it’s impossible not to be bewitched by the effect of standard old winter rain on the battered and desiccated Cape after three bone-dry winters and parching summers. Here are some amateur photos taken by me close to where I live: The first was taken in early April this year, and shows all that’s left of a channel of water separating an island from the lake’s edge. The next, taken four weeks later, shows the channel completely dried up, so much so that the island has an intruder-visitor, who was able to trot over dry-pawed: see if you can spot him. The last one is the same channel, back to usual size/depth.

That’s supposed to be a lake in the background, where the rather disconsolate blacksmith plovers are wandering around. (You can see them if you peer.)

A close-up of the “island”, now part of the main. Spot the non-resident.

And now for the same island, same channel, taken this past week:

I don’t think Mr Ginger Cat will be visiting this island again any time soon.

And these photos make me think of the ripple effects of my current research on waste, and how enormous and complex the topic is. I charged out, rattling my sabre at plastic waste. Only to discover that while we are producing way too much, especially in the form of unnecessary packaging, plastic has its uses in that it reduces food waste (which — as we all know now, is not only wicked in a hungry world, but wastes massive amounts of water). Sample factoid: since fish started being packed in plastic rather than paper, incidences of food poisoning via fish have plummeted. Oh.

Then I started researching alternatives to plastic, only to discover that I needed to check the environmental impact of all those too, from bamboo toothbrushes to cloth shopping bags. (You don’t want to know about the amount of poisons the US spread on their cotton crops in the height of the DDT decades, for instance.)

So it’s all more complicated (and fascinating) than the water crisis, where we could roll up our sleeves and start collecting our grey water for flushing. The other fascinating (and infuriating thing) about trawling through the hundreds of groups on recycling and waste, especially those in the US, is seeing the same thing we learned from our water shortage: if you have an incredibly wasteful middle-class, then you can have an impact by changing their (our) behaviour. Cape Town was able to dramatically shrink its water usage because the wealthier among us were chucking spectacular amounts of drinking water onto lawns, into pools, and down toilets. Stop those three things, and voila: massive water savings. So if you’re consuming enormous amounts of takeaway foods and coffees, for instance — as is culturally the norm in much of North America — just stop or adapt those habits (travel mugs, tupperware), and it looks easy to reduce waste. But that’s assuming that you have those habits in the first place.

The wider issues are complex and interconnected (knotted in fact, with every issue demanding that we unpack our assumptions about the way the world works, hence the outward ripples, and the millions of tunnels opening off internet rabbit-holes) — thinking about all this is making my brain fizz and give off smoke. But it’s also very satisfying and I learn new stuff every day. I shall keep you posted.

Upton Hall, where the gardens were dug up for vegetables during the war.

A few years ago, I spent a glorious early summer’s month doing research for a novel that involved visiting a lot of stately homes and gardens in the UK (yes, a tough job). One place that has stayed with me has been Upton Hall, which was put at the disposal of the nation during World War II by its owners, Lord and Lady Bearsted, who were leading lights of the Anglo-Jewish community at the time.

What does this have to do with saving water and reducing the tons of plastic waste under which we are sinking? When I visited, there was a WWII exhibition called “Make Do And Mend”. It zoomed in on the very many ways that local people recycled, re-used, patched, darned, cobbled or just plain went without during those years of privation during the war and afterwards.

Habits of thriftiness, the notion that waste was morally offensive, threaded through my childhood, and one result is that I get genuine pleasure out of making do and mending. I remember an acquaintance bumping into me as I dropped off favourite boots to be resoled: “What a pity you can’t afford new ones!” she said. I gawked at her as if she had landed from another planet.

Truth be told, I’m a bit obsessive about recycling — also bartering, community exchange programmes, eating something from my own veg garden every day, charity shops and the like. I love occasional trips to the local dump to drop off garden waste — last time I did went, I came home with six gorgeous wooden frames that were being disgorged from someone’s car boot.

But saddeningly, these habits of thrift have become quaint, something your granny did, in the face of rampant shiny capitalism that requires we buy something new every five minutes, and chuck it when it falls apart ten minutes later.

OK, maybe this is going too far.

Unfortunately, it’s precisely this kind of magical thinking — that the planet can sustain infinite economic production — that has led to our current parlous position. I am starting to believe, or hope, that the next wave of job creation is going to involve precisely this kind of mending and making do.

Obviously, I do not want in any way to offend those for whom holes in a child’s school shoes spell financial disaster, or to pretend for a moment that poverty is fun. Yet many forms of recycling and re-using are enormously satisfying. For instance, I got a huge kick out of unpicking jerseys my mother had hand-dyed and knitted for me when I was a girl and reknitting them into scarves.

A great deal of thrifty practice is time-consuming — but it can also be sanity-saving. Simmering soups made with the cheapest fresh veg from the market and homegrown herbs, stitching up a drooping hem or darning a favourite pair of socks, decluttering and donating goods to shelters, running down to the shop for milk on a bike, bartering plants, picking blackberries from a hedge (to stick with the English nostalgia theme), sharing what you have: in a world that seems to grow nastier, colder and more crass by the minute, these small actions are good for our mental health. They’re also very, VERY good for the planet.

Some ideas for spring-cleaning, if you live in Cape Town: the Saartjie Baartman Centre is always desperate for children’s clothing and toiletries (families fleeing domestic violence are seldom able to pack); and the Oasis Recycling Centre is currently running a drive to collect second-hand goods. Dig around online to see what you can find for your locality.

Finally, a favourite tip; and a piece of good news. The tip: my friend Sindiwe taught me that to get every drop of juice out of a lemon, microwave it for 20 seconds before cutting it. The good news: when I went walking on the beach yesterday, FOUR people were picking up plastic waste as they wandered along. There is hope.

Squares into blankets: better than “Made in sweatshop” any day.

Today, for the first time in a while, I went for a long walk on Noordhoek beach, close to where I live. I needed to think. I'd been wondering about climate-change denialists all week, after someone posted several links (on the watershedding Facebook page) "refuting" the awful, inescapable reality that we are turning our planet into a burning tip.

I often wonder about these folk: how is it possible to identify publicly as so credulous and ignorant? I'm sure there are people who truly believe that elves come out and dance at the bottom of their gardens every full moon, but they tend not to stand up and shout about it. It doesn't help that climate-change denial seems to be the official administrative position of supposedly one of the most scientifically advanced countries in the world. From putting the first human on the moon to "No, no, these hurricanes and droughts and melting ice-caps and scary extremes of heat and cold are nothing to do with us!" in 50 years. It's a terrifying time-warp in reverse, even with the facts staring us in the face: here are the bald, brutal figures on the current near-apocalyptic summer in the Northern hemisphere.

Then I read this frightening article. A friend posted it on social media, and wrote "We need to talk about this." No one would. It's too big and too scary to contemplate our lemming-like rush to self-destruction. One thing astronomy has taught us is that there are bazillions of planets out there, spinning through the vast galaxy, and all we've able to learn about them so far is that they are hostile to life. By some extraordinary, incredible, mind-blowing miraculous coincidence, this little stop in the Milky Way has produced the perfect conditions for an equally mind-blowing tapestry of ecosystems and species to thrive. But we're prepared to wreck that -- to turn the planet into a chunk of coal -- and for what? Just so a tiny, tiny percentage of the human population can have solid gold toilets and Lear jets and huge holiday mansions they don't even live in?

By now I was in such despair, I knew only a beach walk would help. This is my prescription: I don layers of jackets, scarves and a woolly hat, roll up my pants, walk down the beach and wade into the sea's edge. Then I slog along through wet sand and brine and froth, the shush of the surf a literal white noise. I swear, it's never THAT cold. Well. Bracing is the word. Something about the sound and scent of the sea, the repetitive movement, the numbness from the knees down, the constant shifts of weather and light, the birds and the mountain vistas switch off the hopeless and helpless thoughts.

And then I spotted a small woman in the distance, who kept stooping. She was wearing a knitted hat with blue and white stripes, and carrying a bag. As I got closer, I realised she was picking up every piece of plastic trash and waste she found, and she'd clearly been at it for a while: her bag was bulging.

And I realised hers was the only sane solution: to the problem of climate change, our water crisis, the problem of plastic waste, our insane economic model of growth and profit (and greed) at all costs: JUST DO SOMETHING. Even if it's an hour on a winter Sunday afternoon helping clean up your own backyard. Or local beach. She gave me a glimmer of hope: reminding me that ordinary people in their everyday lives can have an impact beyond themselves, and the accumulative impact of that has the potential to grow and grow. Maybe there are ways out of this: maybe saving the planet is going to be such a full-time and enormous task that it's going to be the huge job creator of the near future -- and that would be a fine thing.

Whatever the future holds: be more like Blue-Stripey-Hat-Woman. Capetonians know that our water crisis has created all sorts of everyday s/heroes: it's surprisingly easy to be one of them. So thank you: from one wearer of knitted hats to another, I salute you. I didn't want to invade your privacy, so you're in this pic, on the far right, doing your thing, but not identifiable. WAY TO GO and thank you!

Photograph by Ken Barris.

It's raining rain! Hallelujah, it's raining rain! And all weekend too here in Cape Town (after a disquietingly dry few weeks). The grass is green, the flowers have been insisting it's spring for weeks, the dams are steadily filling -- or are they?

I pore over Tom Brown's Cape Water and Dams Report religiously (a consistently trustworthy source of information who supplies proof of or references for every claim he reports), and the latest is that the dams are 56,7% full (overall). But oh dear: in the last fortnight, the rise has been only 0.2%. Yup: not 2%, 0.2%. Now have a look at this very useful chart Tom has been tracking all year:

Taken from https://showme.co.za/paarl/lifestyle/nature-outdoors/cape-water-and-dams-report-116/

You see that yellow band? That's the danger zone -- in other words, where the amount of water available to us is stressed, and unable to meet urban and agricultural needs unless coupled with stringent water restrictions. And this is where we are right now -- and we're approaching the END of our winter rainfall season. To climb out the danger zone, we need to rise beyond 60% (and remember, in the last fortnight, storage crept up by all of 0.2%) to make it through the summer, with its special challenges -- like evaporation, tourism and let's not forget, no rain -- our summers are dry, and like Europe, it seems a scorcher lies in wait for us. (So this is why we're still bathing in buckets. At least, I HOPE YOU ARE.) 

Take a closer look at that graph: especially that notch half-way between April 2018 and May 2018. It shows how narrowly we scraped past a disastrous drop into the failure zone (which would have meant queuing with buckets at water stations). So when I see seasoned journalists claiming that Day Zero was a political hoax, I am tempted to lock them up in a room with this graph and a pair of spectacles. Moreover, we dodged the Day Zero bullet largely because the Groenland Water Users Association (GWUA) released water from their dams into the municipal system, gambling with their own future in the process. So the cavalry really did gallop to the rescue -- but we cannot guarantee that this will happen again.

We have to go on saving ourselves -- and by and large, we're doing a really good job. We never quite get down to the City's target of 450 ML/day, but we hover pretty close to it. And we could do it, too, if a few more people came to the party: because I live on an estate, the water consumption of each household is known not only to the City, but the estate management, which keeps a beady eye on us. I was hugely frustrated to read in the latest newsletter that while a number of us (the majority) are "staying within the restrictions, some are not, and some appear not even to be trying." There are households using more -- in a few cases, WAY more -- than 20 kl per month (twice the limit urged by the City) and they can't ALL have three kids in nappies.

But enough of water, for now: right now, I have now plastic lined up in my sights. See that beautiful photograph of a sea-shore that opens this blog? Now imagine it with a plastic bag or bottle, or a straw, or even an earbud washed up on it. Let's clean up our act. I have lots of ideas for reducing plastic waste and I'd love to hear yours (while totally agreeing with green guru Leonie Joubert that the real change needs to happen at the corporate and manufacturing top of the chain, instead of relying on consumers to mop up the mess at the end). So please send your best plastic-reduction/avoidance tips, and I'll feature them here.

Here's one to start you off, inspired by anti-plastic warrior Karoline Hanks: what's with the plastic bag in which Clicks and Dis-chem seal your medicines before putting it in a wire cage and then locking the cage with a cable-tie? (I fail to understand any part of this process.) Ask the dispensing pharmacist to put your goods straight into the basket, or to use a paper bag, or hand them a paper or cloth bag that can be sealed shut with one of their sticky thingies. And if they have to lock the basket shut (heaven forbid that your 'flu meds might make a bolt for freedom), why not use a padlock that the cashiers all have a key for?

Huge excitement last week: my raintank finally arrived and was installed! It's only taken ten months since I first asked permission... BUT HERE IT IS, FOLKS. Now where is the rain to fill it up? We seem to have slipped back into a dry spell, and we still need a LOT of rain to make it through next summer. But let's stop rain-dancing for a minute -- do you notice anything odd about my newly delivered raintank?

Yes, you spotted it too! Why the sam hill has it been encased in plastic wrap? It's a piece of outdoor equipment made of hard plastic, not eggshell or china, and I'm hardly likely to care about the odd nick or scratch.

Anyone with half an eye knows that the planet is choking on plastic, another long-term debt we're bequeathing to our children's children and the planet. Having been a compulsive recycler for a long time, I'm been noting with growing alarm how products and goods are coming with more and more and more plastic wrapping. I recycle almost everything I don't compost, and while my boxes of tin, glass and paper have stayed the same over years, the bag for plastics just keeps getting more humungous every few months. I'm now filling 2-litre bottles with single-use plastics for donation to building projects, and what's scary is that even shopping with a watchful and green eye, so much of the stuff still manages to sneak into my home.

I saw a lovely headline the other day: "Is plastic the new fur?" Demanding (or rather, passively accepting) that our goods come swathed in plastic is increasingly an ethical problem. It's turning our seas into killing zones, and our landfills into toxic zones (plastic doesn't biodegrade, so it has to be burned, which renders it exceptionally nasty). Don't take my word for it -- this doesn't sound good: " PVC and halogenated additives are mixed into plastic waste and their incineration leads to release of dioxins and polychlorinated-biphenyls into the environment."

But that's enough gloom-science; as this blog is (mostly) for the middle-class consumer, here's one way to cut down on plastic that I've been meaning to punt for ages: how often have you been at the supermarket (or any kind of shop) and realised your reusable bags are at home or in the boot of your car? And what to do about those little rustly plastic bags we put our onions and apples into before having them weighed?

The trail-runner Karoline Hanks has an absolutely brilliant solution: these little shweshwe owls that clip onto your handbag or belt with a tough carabiner. They are small enough that they never get in the way, and out of them, like rabbits from a magician's hat, you pull out three tough but light shopping bags made of parachute fabric, and two lightweight cloth veggie bags (I need more of these, please, otherwise this package can't be faulted). Here, look:

Practical and cute.

And look what emerges!

Contact details: that e-address is karabos@mweb.co.za

Mine was a gift (for which I am grateful every time I trot into a shop), but I believe that they're extremely reasonably priced, and they make wonderful presents. I haven't had to buy a plastic supermarket bag (looking around furtively and guiltily) since getting mine.