Leaves caution behind

Porridge used not to be my favourite dish. The word was usually synonymous with a large amount of congealed starch, impenetrable to the butter, milk and sugar small people added in ever more desperate quantities in the hopes of redeeming the oats or maize meal. It did not help that this sorry substance was usually served up in the most dread institutional contexts of apartheid South Africa: school trips and then the army. When UCT outsourced its catering in my second year at university, the porridge no doubt declined along with everything else we had enjoyed till then. When I finally put those dismal milieux behind me, I turned my back on porridge as well.

Three years ago, I was staying temporarily with a friend, James, in Muizenberg, in a dim but pleasant flat very close to the railway line. My bedroom window was about four metres from the trains and a thoroughfare to the beach and level crossing ran right past my window. I was reading voraciously at the time, my back usually against the wall. Most of the voices I heard passing four feet behind me were French, testimony to the many West Africans living in the area.

James regularly cooked porridge. Lovingly, for hours and hours in a double-boiler, and using a variety of grains, some so exotic I had then never heard of them: qinoa, amaranth, alongside the more conventional oats. Porridge took on a whole new, rather pleasant, set of contexts. Read the rest of this entry »