Ruth's Real Life

  Parakeets, Rats and Budgies When you feed the birds, you feed the rats. My desk looks out onto a bird feeding station. Every morning, I put out a range of seed, rice, sunflower seeds, apples and sometimes, grapes. Within minutes, the tree is a feathered wonderland. Johannesburg is classified as an urban forest and the birds make the most of the trees in our garden. Frequent visitors to the feeders are the rose-ringed parakeets. Their bright green plumage and sassy character make them entertaining visitors. But they are also alien and feral. They dominate the food and chase the smaller birds away. Every now and again, a blue budgie flutters in to defy the bully birds, on the run/fly from his cage and looking for a meal.   I open my curtains to the noise and movement and the birds are my symphony as I work. He comes over the top of the wall. Down the tree, along a branch, fat and sleek and looking for apples and seeds. He is a brown abomination of fur with a tail as ...

A single sentence can change the shape of the world. This one changed mine.  It was an ordinary day on an ordinary afternoon, and I was sitting on an ordinary couch. A late winter sun was lengthening the shadows in the garden. It felt like winter and there were certainly shadows, but it may well have been summer. When you’re at the bottom of the black pit of depression, most days seem wintery. Oprah was doing one of her usual TV interviews and her voice was a soothing antidote to the loneliness of the day. She was talking to a young woman who had been through years of abuse and fought the dragons of her darkness. I was mostly lost in my own space but there was one sentence spoken by her that pierced my heart: ‘You should never have to fight to be loved.’ That one sentence was a turning point for me. It was a moment of clarity that allowed me to take a step forward and that is often the most difficult thing – the one step forward – the step that will take us away f...