Ruth's Real Life

  Every Dream Has Its Brown Kitchen ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ These words from my partner, on an ordinary weekday afternoon in January, started the journey towards a dream. Jules decided to take early retirement and suddenly our house was on the market, and we were looking for property in Plettenberg Bay. We had often thought about where we would like to be once we had both retired and had visited places along the Garden Route, finally settling on Plettenberg Bay as our destination. One day. Perhaps. It was nice to think about but seemed not much more than a dream. The ‘For Sale’ sign went up on the pavement. We had to find somewhere to live. My eldest brother has lived in Plett for 20 years and started the search for us. Eventually, he found a place that seemed ideal. We bought it   before our Johannesburg house had been sold. And before we had seen the property on which we had made an offer. One thing you should never trust are estate agent’s photographs. 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...