How our daughter Belinda got to hold THE CUP

Dear Sports Fans,

         The last thing we would have expected was to see this daughter of ours with THE CUP.

         She’s not a bit sporty and I don’t think she knows a rugby player from a cricketer.

         But there she was holding THE CUP looking as pleased as any winner.

         I’m sure the rest of the family were just as surprised as we were. She’s a fashion designer not some hot shot athlete; let alone a Springbok rugby fan.

         So how could she have possibly wangled it to be pictured like this holding THE CUP?

         The secret’s out now.

         Here is the all revealing picture of her holding THE CUP.

         Her friend Australian TV personality Shaynna Blaze invited Belinda Glynn to accompany her to the Melbourne Cup - Australia’s premier horse race that brings the nation to a standstill once a year. 150 000 people were there, although attendance was down this time because of animal abuse protests.

         It seems there’s always somebody protesting about something wherever you go these days.

Shaynna beside the helicopter they arrived in

         They were flown in by helicopter in true celebrity style and whisked away to the Bird Cage, otherwise known as the V.I.P. enclosure. In one of the marquees the cup was passed around for people to have their pictures taken. Everybody handling it had to wear a white glove so as not to damage it in any way, as if Vow and Declare, the first Aussie horse to win in a decade was worried about that as it passed the winning post.

         Outside the area where Belinda was that was reserved exclusively for the toffs the peasants were living it up in keeping with their status as these Daily Mail pictures show.

Not one of the winners and a Flower Child looking 
for his bottle

A stickler for tidiness

A Sure Bet

          Darling, I’m so thankful we were well separate from that lot. The way they behaved was absolutely ghastly. Imagine the trouble we would have if one of them managed to gate crash our New Year’s Eve Ball. It would spoil it completely.

         True to her sporting pedigree Belinda didn’t even have a bet, something she might have regretted if she had heard that one young punter won a cool $800 000 shortly after he bust up with his girlfriend on the course. But there’s nothing like a win like this to bring a couple together again.

         Belinda and her friend certainly had their fill of racing over two days which gave our daughter, the sole inspiration behind the Once Was fashion label, the opportunity to show off another one of her own designs.
         I couldn’t possibly be seen in the same creation two days running, my dear. I would never live that down.

Belinda & husband
Cameron 

         Shaynna is an interior designer, writer and former singer who is best known for co-hosting shows like Selling House Australia and other ones to do with the buying and selling of houses and the like.

         Belinda Glynn is a naturalised Australian, born and educated in South Africa where she studied clothing design at the Natal Tech before emigrating to Melbourne. There she has made quite a name for herself as a fashion designer.

         Regards,

         Jon & Gayle

P.S. Do you recognise this CUP?

P.P.S. For those in the more civilised parts of the world where they don’t play barbaric games, the relevance of this story is that South Africa has been in the grip of rugby fever since it won the rugby WORLD CUP for the third time in Japan. And THE CUP, followed by crazed fans, has just been paraded around the country.

 

POPPIES, POPPIES EVERYWHERE AND HARDLY A DROP TO DRINK

Dear Readers,

         The drought in Cape Town devastated our kikuyu lawn which can normally be expected to revive as soon as the winter rains arrive. But this year it was so pathetic that instead of being green it turned red.

         Flanders poppies took over. We didn’t plant them nature did.

         About four years ago a neighbour gave us a few seeds. They are minute, like small grains of sand.

After that we had some in the flower beds here and there and one year they almost disappeared completely for no particular reason. So the last thing my wife and I expected was that a drought would supercharge their growth to something we had never seen before in the 10 years we have been in our house.

        

             And they didn’t only appear where the lawn had been. They popped up all over the place. If our driveway hadn’t been brick paved it too would have been covered in red. As it was they still managed to end up flowering in some of the joints between the pavers.

         One even gained a foothold on the side of a small brick wall. How that little seed could have remained there long enough to germinate in a soilless environment only nature knows.

         The majority are red, but inexplicably a few pure white ones appear every now and again.  We have tried planting the seeds from these in the past, but we never get anything like a bed of white. How it works I don’t know.

         A Canadian doctor’s haunting poem and the efforts of an American school teacher put this red flower on the map as a symbol of remembrance of those who fought and died in various conflicts from the First World War onwards.

         In Flanders Fields, the world’s most famous War Memorial Poem was composed by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae on the battle front at Ypres, Belgium in 1915. These poppies grow naturally in areas of disturbed earth throughout Western Europe, so when World War 1 churned up the fields of Flanders and Northern France they turned the barren earth into a sea of blood red so different to the fighting that had just ceased.

Lt. Col. John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields

         Then thanks to the determined efforts of an American school teacher Moina Bell Michael an artificial red Flanders Fields Memorial Poppy was adopted by numerous organisations around the world to raise money for ex-service men and women in need of assistance. 

        Now almost 100 years later it is still the inspiration for a Poppy Day every November because it was on the 11^th of that month that the Great War ended in 1918.

    

          Michael, who was inspired by McCrae’s poem, wrote her own one We shall keep the faith. And that’s exactly what she did by starting this everlasting remembrance movement.

         The White Poppy has had a much more chequered existence. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t grow nearly as prolifically as the Red one. Britain’s Women’s Co-operative Guild adopted it in 1933 as a lasting symbol of peace.

         Worn on Armistice Day, now Remembrance Day white poppy replicas were at one time produced by the Co-operative Wholesale Society because the Royal British Legion refused to be associated with its manufacture. Veterans felt it undermined the meaning of the red poppy.

         It was so divisive that some women lost their jobs in the 1930s for wearing the white ones. In 1940 Britain’s Daily Mail called for it to be banned because it was encouraging conscientious objectors.

         The White Poppy Appeal is now run by the Peace Pledge Union, the oldest non-sectarian pacifist organisation in Britain.

         APPROPRIATELY A HIGH PERCENTAGE OF THESE POPPIES HAS A CROSS OF SOME KIND IN THE CENTER, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE WHITE ONES.

         Regards

         Jon

P.S. Here’s hoping they will stick to gardens and won’t be popping up after any battles in South Africa in the future.