Jiggity-jig

It’s just as well my wife doesn’t live in a cheesy detective story, because she left town over the weekend. For good. Bye bye Miss American Pie – well, except for the ‘miss’ part. And the ‘American’ part – and I actually haven’t a clue what the ‘pie’ is all about, but ‘bye bye’ is still appropriate, dammit!

Anyhoo.. the point is that soon-to-be-ex Mrs Kyknoord kitted herself and the sprog out in their best travelling gear and headed off to greener pastures – i.e. the bustling metropolis of Port Elizabeth*. Why there, of all places, you ask? Well, PE has several advantages over Cape Town: It’s where she grew up; it’s currently infested by my soon-to-be-ex Mother in law; and – most importantly – I am not there.

So I moved back into the flat on Saturday. She had stripped the place of most of the furniture and fittings, but she’d left just enough to make it appear utterly abandoned and desolate. When I unlocked the door for the first time in three months, I understood how it must have felt to walk onto the Marie Celeste (assuming there had been a “let’s throw all the furniture overboard” party beforehand). I managed to thrust aside the incongruous image of a lonely tumbleweed blowing across the lounge before my metaphors collapsed under their own weight.

I spent the remainder of the weekend scrubbing the floor. If she’d been a little bit more diligent in her endeavour to create the filthiest carpet in the history of time, the entire thing would have been one big stain and I wouldn’t ache all over.

* Approximately 500 miles to the east of Cape Town