DOWN THE SLIPPY SLOAP
DOWN THE SLIPPY SLOAP
I have my 25 new ladies and am enchanted with them, I have even got over my buyers remorse and am looking forward to a long and tender relationship with these wonderful cows. I spent a morning with their father a grand fellow who has had an unnatural relationship with this particular breed of animal for yea 15 years or more and is thus an expert.
He was very gentle with me as he bust my cherry re all things bovine, though he did enjoy scaring my knickers off with all the different injections, dips, sprays and other chores that come hand in hand with these particular animals, one would think that they are all just conspiring together to find ever more evocatively named diseases to die off, from lumpy skin to stiff sickness, it all sounds quite disgusting.
I was then taken to be introduced to my new charges, that took one look and tried to flee the country. They charged around in a very disconcerting manner doing their best to avoid all contact with the bi-pedal monkeys that we had sent to round them up. They knew already in their young lives that this sort of attention usually ended up with something sharp being stuck in their backsides and they were not wrong.
They were all forced into a narrow wooden passage know appropriatly as a crush where I was initiated into the art of sticking it to female grass-eating quadrupeds. Dave has this cunning trick where he holds the needle (large one) just so, then smacks the cow on the rump and quick as a snake in the grass thrusts it into the animal, the first time he showed me it was like a magic trick but I was soon smacking and sticking with the best of them and we injected the entire herd, it was a thrill really I was leaping up and down in excitement at the whole thing and got so macho and worked up about the whole idea that for the first time in my life I went to a pub on the way home to have a beer!
On a different note the estate is finding it more and more difficult to justify the staff levels that we are carrying as the wattle tree problem and tourism trade are not really keeping my sweating classes busy and productive, an anathema to a lazy bloke like me, so I have gorn into the soap biz.
My sainted sister has been flogging soap in England for quite a while with her loony friends at their local market, and they have like a coven of witches come up with very snappy recipes. Which if any of you have ever looked at the many books available on soap making is the key to the whole thing, which she has after some thumb screw work and nail pulling graceful condescended to let us, under license, use here in darkest Africa.
We (Poppy, Norah and I) have been cooking and mixing it up in the studio for last few weeks, and after some considerable investment in essential oils, palm and other oils, mixers, pots and a great deal of other expensive stuff have finally perfected, sort of, the fine art of samponification, or soap making and the studio now smells like the inside of a tarts handbag, not unpleasant.
The knity gritty however was whether we could unload this product on an unsuspecting public, all my forays into the swamp of retail product sales in the past have not been nice at all and the initial attempts were not heartening, all the ladies loved the stuff but my little helpers and I were less than sure that we could get the price required to make a profit as soap is quite cheap really and we needed to sell our’s at 3 times the price of the most expensive stuff at the local supermarket, not promising, but a call came through from the local market mafia who were throwing a fest at Tonteldoes a village on the other side of Dullstroom to us, and the opportunity to test the waters was to strong to resist, and we went into full production mode producing vast quantities of sweet smelling slabs of soap and even inventing a few new ones ourselves, having labeled and wrapped the bars in sexy raffia and with Norah in tow I liaised with Cheryl and her cow skins at the venue.
Tonteldoes which for the curious means ‘Flint box’ in Afrikaans is a tiny little village that throws an annual peach festival, and as the village is in the very heart of trout syndicate country is really quite well attended and is cute as hell with a pub and a village green where we set up among the peach brandy and dry peach merchants with our little stall of soap.
At first the pace was a little slow and the only trade being done was between the stallholders selling to each other but soon the punters started to roll in and the soap fairly flew of the shelf, most gratifying. The ladies loved it and did not blink at the price so it looks like we are in business, which it turns out is in fact an old family concern as my great granddad on the Jewish side financed his bank which I should have inherited but for the attentions of the Nazi swine, but then if not for them I would not have been selling soap under an African sun at flint box village so all things considered perhaps it has worked out for the best.
I have my 25 new ladies and am enchanted with them, I have even got over my buyers remorse and am looking forward to a long and tender relationship with these wonderful cows. I spent a morning with their father a grand fellow who has had an unnatural relationship with this particular breed of animal for yea 15 years or more and is thus an expert.
He was very gentle with me as he bust my cherry re all things bovine, though he did enjoy scaring my knickers off with all the different injections, dips, sprays and other chores that come hand in hand with these particular animals, one would think that they are all just conspiring together to find ever more evocatively named diseases to die off, from lumpy skin to stiff sickness, it all sounds quite disgusting.
I was then taken to be introduced to my new charges, that took one look and tried to flee the country. They charged around in a very disconcerting manner doing their best to avoid all contact with the bi-pedal monkeys that we had sent to round them up. They knew already in their young lives that this sort of attention usually ended up with something sharp being stuck in their backsides and they were not wrong.
They were all forced into a narrow wooden passage know appropriatly as a crush where I was initiated into the art of sticking it to female grass-eating quadrupeds. Dave has this cunning trick where he holds the needle (large one) just so, then smacks the cow on the rump and quick as a snake in the grass thrusts it into the animal, the first time he showed me it was like a magic trick but I was soon smacking and sticking with the best of them and we injected the entire herd, it was a thrill really I was leaping up and down in excitement at the whole thing and got so macho and worked up about the whole idea that for the first time in my life I went to a pub on the way home to have a beer!
On a different note the estate is finding it more and more difficult to justify the staff levels that we are carrying as the wattle tree problem and tourism trade are not really keeping my sweating classes busy and productive, an anathema to a lazy bloke like me, so I have gorn into the soap biz.
My sainted sister has been flogging soap in England for quite a while with her loony friends at their local market, and they have like a coven of witches come up with very snappy recipes. Which if any of you have ever looked at the many books available on soap making is the key to the whole thing, which she has after some thumb screw work and nail pulling graceful condescended to let us, under license, use here in darkest Africa.
We (Poppy, Norah and I) have been cooking and mixing it up in the studio for last few weeks, and after some considerable investment in essential oils, palm and other oils, mixers, pots and a great deal of other expensive stuff have finally perfected, sort of, the fine art of samponification, or soap making and the studio now smells like the inside of a tarts handbag, not unpleasant.
The knity gritty however was whether we could unload this product on an unsuspecting public, all my forays into the swamp of retail product sales in the past have not been nice at all and the initial attempts were not heartening, all the ladies loved the stuff but my little helpers and I were less than sure that we could get the price required to make a profit as soap is quite cheap really and we needed to sell our’s at 3 times the price of the most expensive stuff at the local supermarket, not promising, but a call came through from the local market mafia who were throwing a fest at Tonteldoes a village on the other side of Dullstroom to us, and the opportunity to test the waters was to strong to resist, and we went into full production mode producing vast quantities of sweet smelling slabs of soap and even inventing a few new ones ourselves, having labeled and wrapped the bars in sexy raffia and with Norah in tow I liaised with Cheryl and her cow skins at the venue.
Tonteldoes which for the curious means ‘Flint box’ in Afrikaans is a tiny little village that throws an annual peach festival, and as the village is in the very heart of trout syndicate country is really quite well attended and is cute as hell with a pub and a village green where we set up among the peach brandy and dry peach merchants with our little stall of soap.
At first the pace was a little slow and the only trade being done was between the stallholders selling to each other but soon the punters started to roll in and the soap fairly flew of the shelf, most gratifying. The ladies loved it and did not blink at the price so it looks like we are in business, which it turns out is in fact an old family concern as my great granddad on the Jewish side financed his bank which I should have inherited but for the attentions of the Nazi swine, but then if not for them I would not have been selling soap under an African sun at flint box village so all things considered perhaps it has worked out for the best.
posted by Francis at 6:06 AM
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