Nouwens winner

Neulah Mallinson – Claremont

Crossword #37 winner

Babs Bester – Kuilsriver

February

Defy winners

Elizma Rossouw – Bonnievale

Annelize Kleyngeld – Port Elizabeth

Mary Mendes – Milnerton

Lorna Stirling – Lonehill

Crossword #38 winner

Erica Tavira – Carletonville

March

Alpine Lounge winner

Shaun Knoesen – Bloemfontein

Crossword #39 winner

Lizanne Ellis – Pietermaritzburg

April

Slumberland winners

Debbie de Bastos – Cape Town

V Burger – Kuilsrivier

Dewald van der Rijst – Oudtshoorn

Arlene Beukes – Thersa Park

Nawaal Rossier-Baboo – Cape Town

Akanksha Malik-Nair – Pinelands

Lynne McMurray – Durbanville

Crossword #40 winner

Jenny de Swarts – Winklespruit

Judy Strydom – Durban

Yve Cohoe – Mosssel Bay

3 readers will receive a large format (609x910mm) limited edition image from a selected range, excluding frame, worth R9 000 each.

A further 5 readers will win the opportunity to attend one of Marlene’s weekend photographic workshops, valued at R2 000, at her Centre in East London. This includes two nights’ accommodation and transfers to and from East London airport (excluding airfares), kindly sponsored by Meander Inn (043 726 2310, meanderinn.co.za).

Explore a new world with Marlene Neumann’s timeless Fine Art Photography, in which she transforms landscapes and global images using her own special darkroom technique that gives her work that ‘painterly’ feeling. Marlene captures the essence of an image and brings it to life, enhancing her reputation as a ‘new’ Old Master.

This inspirational artist shares her knowledge and imparts a whole new perspective on life through her unique ‘Creativity through Photography’ workshops at her Centre for Photography and Light in East London. ‘Students do not need any prior knowledge of photography but rather a zest for life,’ says Marlene.

For details on her workshops, to view or order her collection of unique fine art photography call 083 321 3391 or go to marleneneumann.com.

Answer this easy question: Where is Marlene Neumann’s Centre for Photography and Light situated?

CLOSING DATE 12 June 2012

‘Budget’ has always been a dirty word to me. Ever since Barend du Plessis’ days as Minister of Finance, the budget’s only affected me by pushing up the price of my cigarettes.

Our household still doesn’t have a budget. But we’re living far more simply now than before the recession. We think before we buy, and only buy with cash – excellent budgeting advice. Even when we hit the hyperstores, we buy only what’s needed, nothing more.

It’s as if the recession has made us aware of money again, and of what it can buy and what not. But you certainly can’t buy humanity in a store, let alone happiness, recognition and love…

At this stage of my life I also want less and want to live with less. Three years ago, we converted our 450m² house into a guesthouse and if we wanted a roof over our heads, we had only one option: off to the garage. We created such a lovely living space in 21m² that I’d battle to give it up today to move back into the house.

We’re humble again, in 2012. Simple things matter – like your life partner and children, the food you eat, the vegetables in your garden, whether the cat loves you, and what you mean to others.

Still, there are many ways to balance your budget:

Save energy In summer, our forefathers drew the curtains early in the morning; the rooms stayed dark all day and late in the afternoon, when the sun started setting, the curtains and shutters were opened to let cool air flood the house. My Oupa Koot draped wet hessian bags in the attic during February – beneath them the house was deliciously cool.

We do the same today, building our homes in such a way that every window lets in a breeze, regulating the temperature and cooling the air.

Only one light is on at a time in any room, solar power heats our water, and when we switch on the oven we bake everything at once – bread, rusks, biscuits… maybe even a rack of lamb, or just potatoes or sweet potatoes in their jackets.

Save on cleaning agents Buy vinegar and clean your house with that. Dump all that ammonia – vinegar does the same job, as do lemons from your garden, mixed with salt. We do our laundry with those ecofriendly green balls that replace detergents, and water the garden with grey water from the washing machine.

Save fuel I travel at 100km/h on the freeway, listen to the radio and music, and take in my surroundings.

Save on food My bakkie always has a two-litre container of cold water for me to drink, with a couple of rosy-cheeked apples for when I feel peckish. We don’t buy fancy foods – we eat bread with a swipe of Marmite, topped with fried eggs, sliced tomatoes and chopped onion leaves straight from the garden… or mashed potatoes with gently fried wors and a delicious gravy made from the meat’s juices.

We serve our dinner guests homemade bread, a fresh garden salad, and pasta with feta, chopped tomatoes and olives, a dash of fresh lemon juice and freshly ground black pepper.

I often ask people, ‘What do you do to balance your budget?’ And the answer invariably is: ‘We’re eating bread again.’

It’s true. Bread stands out in my childhood memories of night-time: scrumptious thick slices with farm butter and apricot jam. Or cheese and tomatoes in the summer. During winter the fare was biltong, the ever-present Marmite or fish paste, and all-natural peanut butter mixed with apricot jam.

But the biggest treat of all was Saturday night’s braai-roasted sandwiches.

I wouldn’t swap those for the world. You spread butter inside and out, fill the sandwich with sliced onion, tomato and cheese, add black pepper, and top it all with a spoon or two of tomato, pineapple and chilli jam. Then you close it tightly and ceremoniously march it to the fire. High above the coals, you carefully braai it until it starts to look like the bulging cheeks of a chestnut stallion galloping up the dunes of the central Kalahari.

Set the table, light a candle and sit down to your daily bread. Call down a blessing upon the loaf, call it your budget feast, and humbly commemorate your forefathers. Because we continually complain, even though we have much, much more than they ever had in their entire lives.

Translated by Jan Venter

It was an old Afrikaner tradition that when young men went courting, they had to go home when the candle had burnt out.

And when I think of this opsitkers or ‘courting candle’, images from Manakwalanners, the delightful TV series set in 1944, immediately come to mind. The producer, Johan van Jaarsveld, had a rare talent for reflecting humankind at its humble best.

 Take Sussie and Boerie, played by the inimitable Lizz Meiring and the young Jan Ellis. Boerie was totally besotted with the voluptuously curvaceous Sussie, who effortlessly reduced him to a sweating wreck whenever he went calling on her, hat in hand, at the general dealer’s store.

And like so many of the female persuasion, she kept him on his toes; you could tell by the tortured stammering with which he clumsily tried to woo her…

Sussie pouts while feigning an unawareness of what’s going on, but from under those black lashes she peeps at Boerie’s beautiful eyes, his broad shoulders, and his almost equally broad, dazzling white smile. Boerie’s buying sweets from the jar, the ones with words on them, all in washed-out ice-cream colours. They are powdery sweet confections that always tasted to me as though they hadn’t been properly dusted.

He buys a handful and then carefully, silently, reads each one.

Finally, he plucks up the courage and places one in Sussie’s hands, blushing right to the roots of his hair.

Sussie looks at the pale pink sweet and reads: Ek wil vry (‘I want to woo’).

Her eyelashes sweep downwards like those of a donkey mare, she studies her shoes, smoothes out her apron, then coyly looks up as she pops the sweet into her mouth.

‘Yes, Boerie. You can come.’

Boerie’s face lights up as if he could power the entire Koeberg nuclear station all by himself. Stumbling over his own feet, he mutters a ‘’Till  later then, Sussie’ as he leaves the store.

Early that evening, Sussie bathes in the bathroom on the stoep. The geyser’s gas flame sounds just as hoarse as Boerie, she thinks to herself as she dries herself and liberally douses her body with Johnson’s baby powder. Next, she settles down at the dressing table in her room and brushes her hair out until it swirls like the waves of the ocean. She applies two dabs of lipstick to her cheeks and rubs them in, then applies lipstick to her mouth, blotting and smoothing until they shine like two ripe strawberries. She slips on a pretty pink floral dress and dabs some KWV cologne behind her ears. She hears a horse galloping up outside, and her suitor’s hasty dismount.

From inside, her mother calls: ‘Sussie, Boerie’s here!’ Hips swaying and eyes shining like two coach lights, she walks into the sitting room.

Boerie stands there, looking as though he’s just been attacked by the north wind, as windswept as Namaqualand after a sandstorm. The living room is silent, with only the gas lamp hissing. They drink coffee from the Sunday cups with the pink roses. Her father drinks his from the saucer, bringing it to his lips to blow it cooler.

Then he gets up, lights the tallow candle and says, ‘Come, woman, let’s let the children alone’.

Boerie can’t control himself.

Stuttering like a Standard Three pupil, he asks Sussie if he can sit next to her on the settee. He sits down, almost missing the settee. But he does manage to sit.

The grandfather clock ticks away in the hall. ‘Ja, Sussie,’ he sighs. ‘Ja, Boerie,’ she sighs in return. Then the two stare straight ahead into the gloom.

The candle burns on. Boerie looks at it, and then inches towards Sussie.

More sighing.

Finally, just before the candle flame flickers out in the candleholder, the poor tongue-tied man wraps his arms around Sussie. ‘Boerieee’, she sighs.

Then her father coughs from the bedroom. ‘Come, Sussie, it’s bedtime.’

Boerie straightens his clothing, puts on his hat and, with eyes ablaze, opens the door, first the top, then the bottom. He looks straight into Sussie’s eyes. ‘G’night, Sussie.’ ‘G’night, Boerie.’ And with her chest flushing red, she quietly closes the door as the horse gallops off into the night…

With gratitude for the images etched into my memory. Manakwalanners, directed by Koos Roets.

Translated by Jan Venter

When I was a little boy, I lived for holidays, anywhere–as long as it was at the ocean.

We lived in Robertson. In summer, the heat was suffocating – but there was great anticipation in our home, especially in the kitchen. The old paraffin rusk tin was cleaned out, as were the cookie tins with the kitten faces, the red and pink geraniums and the assortment of chocolate sweets in a kaleidoscope of colours.

Then, early one morning my mother and nana Eva would start baking: farm butter from Dassieshoek mixed with flour that was always sifted three times, grandpa Koot’s almonds, vanilla essence, white sugar, fine ginger, anise, currants, red glazed cherries and loads of mixing bowls that we would clean with our tiny, sticky fingers.

Baking day only ended when every tin was full to bursting with cookies and rusks. Then the packing started: the Studebaker was packed to the rafters, the roof rack topped with suitcases strapped down with red rope. Braai grid, meat from the farm, extra kerosene for the oil lamps, candles, quilts for the cold sea air at night, swimming trunks, beach towels, hats, colouring books, slingshots, plastic buckets and spades, green nets to chase the baby fish in the rock pools and, for my mother, loads of books from the local library.

Finally, we leave Robertson with her vineyards and blue mountains; nana Eva would take care of our dog and cats. In the back of the light blue, winged car we sing, and play at guessing what the next car to come over the horizon will be. ‘A Herbie!’ shouts Herman. Then me: ‘Fairmont!’ The game continues until my father swerves and stops in front of the beach house with the blue agapanthus in full flower on the front stoep and in the backyard, the fig tree with the wooden table and benches under her shade.

Once at Struisbaai, the house is aired. We’d dust, sweep the sand from our home, make the beds and unpack our clothes – in haste, because the blue ocean with its twinkling diamonds was waiting for us.

The days become one, each fitting the other like a puzzle, the smell of roasted mutton chops flavoured with coriander seeds, salt and pepper on the coals; farm sausage and all the neighbours’ fires wafting in the air. Flavours and tastes linger: snoek flavoured with apricot jam and farm fennel; periwinkle cooked in big black pots on the open fires, cleaned, minced and flavoured with salt, white pepper, chopped parsley, lemon and nutmeg; roasted crayfish with lemon butter…

The happy laughter of loads of children, the murmur of grown-ups chatting, festive music on FM radio.

We’d wake at the same time as the sun rising over the sea, thirsty for my mother’s moerkoffie. We’d butter slices of fresh white anise flavoured bread, squash them together and dip them in the hot, sweet milky coffee, the sweet anise mingling with ouma Nellie’s salty farm butter and devoured by our hungry mouths.

Then we’d run out and play in the waves, each day our skins deepening from red to brown, and more freckles appearing on my nose. I laugh, we all laugh, my mother swims in a soft blue onepiece costume and my father reads books by Andre P Brink. Late in the afternoon we’d devour yellow cling peaches and the sweetest watermelons – then chase one another with the peels, then play rotten egg, hide-and-seek and tok tokkie ’til dusk.

In the evening we all ate at the wooden table, my father saying the prayer before we wolfed down my mother’s boerekos, big plates full of wonderful, simply flavoured food, because the sea air would give us ravenous appetites.

After supper the cards came out. We’d play rummy and bridge around the spluttering oil lamp while outside, the wind from the sea would help the waves to kiss the sand good night, while through the windows with the frayed floral curtains, the light from the oil lamp would gently throw her beams on the shadows of the front stoep.

- Niël Stemmet

TAL makes tiling easy and recently introduced TAL Stonefix, a new thick-bed natural stone tile adhesive that is perfect for natural installations.

If you’re planning on renovating your stoep or braai area, TAL Stonefix is the adhesive to use when fixing hard-wearing dark-coloured natural stone tiles. TAL Stonefix makes any natural stone installation easier and quicker.hat is perfect for natural stone installations.

It is ideal for fixing dark-coloured natural stone tiles such as slate, sandstone, quartzite, marble and granite to walls and floors, and can also be used when laying ceramic, porcelain and quarry tiles.

TAL Stonefix can be built up to a thickness of 12mm, and up to 20mm in isolated areas, facilitating the bedding in of heavy natural stone tiles. It is high-strength and quick-setting as it sets within 12 hours, depending on site and ambient conditions. Grouting can commence six to eight hours after installation.

TAL offers a range of products that can be used in conjunction with TAL Stonefix. Some of these products are mushroom colour TAL Wall & Floor Grout, a perfect match to neutral-coloured tiles; TAL Stain Free grout, a pigment-free grout specially designed to greatly reduce the staining of highly porous tiles, overcoming the ‘picture frame’ effect encountered with conventional grouts, and a range of standard set quarry grouts in different colours to cater for wider tile joints.

TAL supplies a wide range of tiling solutions to take care of all your tiling requirements. You can find TAL products at all major hardware and home improvement retailers. Visit the DIY tab on the TAL website www.tal.co.za where you’ll find useful links and step-by-step guides to assist you with tiling, screeding and waterproofing.

For additional assistance contact the TAL Technical Advice Centre number on 0860 000 TAL(825).

As we head into the winter months, think about planting up a host of spring-flowering shrubs and perennials:

• Spring flowering shrubs include Cape may, flowering plums, peaches and cherries.
• Spring-flowering climbers include Carolina jasmine, Chinese jasmine, petrea, banksia rose, and wisteria.
• For an abundance of spring blooms, fertilise spring-flowering plants once a month from May till the end of flowering and water regularly.

There’s nothing like stepping into an invigorating shower to gear you up for a long day – or refresh yourself at the end of one. It’s no wonder that wet rooms are gaining in popularity with more homeowners transforming their bathrooms from a practical room into a spacious area for the ultimate spa-like experience.

Frameless showers meet this trend spot on, and are custom designed to be as individual as you are. These modern shower enclosures are made from clear safety glass, making a bathroom appear much bigger than it is, and are beautifully complemented by contemporary accessories such as an over-sized shower rose and stylish mixer set.

If you’re looking to personalise your bathroom or shower with an exclusive bold touch, consider a zesty orange mosaic feature wall – after all, colour authority Pantone declared Tangerine Tango, an energetic reddish orange, as the colour of the year for 2012.

Customise your own design and choose from a wide range of colourful mosaics to get the look you’re after; vivid mosaic tiles create a dramatic effect if used as a solid block of colour behind the shower. If a flamboyant orange feature wall doesn’t tickle your fancy, try adding mosaics as an edging or border to deliver a quick colour punch.

For more information, call 0800 002 783 or visit tileafrica.co.za. Find Tile Africa on Twitter and Facebook for more creative ideas for your home.

Inspired by our stunning April cover feature on caravans to relive an experience in one – or dying to try it out for the first time?

Grab this chance to take a country break at the innately stylish yet unpretentious Old Mac Daddy, a luxury trailer park in the scenic Elgin Valley where comfort and the creation of good memories is key.
This Gold Loerie Award-winning project consists of ten trailer suites, two lakeside units and a designer self-catering family house. Each of our trailer suites is a world of its own – vintage Airstream motorhomes that have been transformed into bespoke bedrooms, each with its own theme, style and feeling – from the magical to the quirky and a whole range of delicate and wonderful things in between.
So head on down to the Elgin Valley where you can sleep in style, surrounded by orchards, vineyards, frog-song ponds and dusty mountain-bike roads.

For more information or to book, call 021 844 0241, mail reservations@oldmacdaddy.co.za or go to www.oldmacdaddy.co.za

WIN Two readers can each win a two-night stay for two, including breakfast, in any one of the trailers at Old Mac Daddy in Elgin.

These flowers might not have the fragrance of the real thing, but they taste good and can be used to give any cake a romantic touch.

Makes: 4-6 roses
Preparation time: approximately 30 minutes per rose

350g dark chocolate
75ml liquid glucose

Tips
• It’s important to knead the mixture properly so that it can be handled easily. Use it immediately, before it has chance to harden.
• Be patient – you need to practise and develop a feeling for the mixture, but the results make it worthwhile.
• Use good-quality chocolate, as this affects how easy it is to handle the mixture.
• Have a dish of cold water close at hand while you work and wash your hands regularly. The colder your hands the better, otherwise the mixture ‘sweats’ and becomes crumbly.
• The mixture becomes rock-hard when it’s completely cold. Keep it in a warm place, or under a lamp, while you are working.
• White chocolate can also be used – in fact, thanks to the absence of cocoa solids, it is easier to handle. You can also colour it with powdered food colouring.
• It is possible to use the same technique with shop-bought modelling icing.

1 Chop or grate the chocolate and mix it with the glucose in a mixing bowl. Place the bowl over a saucepan containing simmering water (the bottom should not touch the water) and stir until the chocolate has melted. Set aside to cool. The chocolate will begin to harden from the outside as it cools, therefore stir the mixture occasionally. Once the mixture is cold, it must be kneaded until it has the texture of clay. It shouldn’t stick to your hands and might be slightly oily. It should be used immediately.

2 Pinch off a piece the size of a grape and shape it into a cone about 4cm long – this forms the inside of the rose.

3 Take another piece, roll it flat between two layers of clingfilm or baking paper and cut out a circle 2cm in diameter. Remember, real rose petals are thin and delicate, so shape the edges of the circle between your fingers to make them thinner and more pliable.

4 Hold one side of the shaped petal against the base of the cone and carefully turn it around the base. Pinch the base of the petal so that it sticks and bend the tips slightly backwards so that it looks like the inside of a rose. Repeat with another two petals of the same size and shape them around the cone. The next three petals are made by cutting slightly bigger circles (about 3cm in diameter) and following the same process. The chocolate becomes warm as you handle it and will therefore stick quite easily. Remember to shape the tips of the petals to create a more realistic appearance.

5 For the five outermost petals you should once again use the method described in step 4 but make the circles even bigger. Leave the rose to rest for a few hours before forming the stalk by cutting the cone with a sharp knife.