Welcome to the movie.

The life of Alice would make a good thriller at the moment.

Or perhaps a drama. Either way, it has all the elements necessary to induce total and complete madness or to make you change your religion.
The current story line looks something like this:

Woman bravely gives up everything to follow her dream of becoming a location independent, travelling pro blogger and Sangoma even though everyone thinks she’s finally lost the last of her marbles (or just the big important one in the middle). At least, that’s the sexy way of summing it up. The unsexy way is to say that she’s now homeless by choice. (Hence many references to madness.)


As Woman prepares for the final cut (moving out of her flat), she knuckles down and braces herself but all and all copes exceptionally well with the loss of her cat, the loss of her home, storing her possessions for the next five years and blindly believing that she’s going to find funding for above mentioned adventurous lifestyle when there’s absolutely no proof to support this.


But then!


Her beloved and trusty car breaks down. It’s serious the mechanic says, but don’t you worry Little Miss. R6,000 should cover it. You’ll have your car back in a week he says, when the parts have arrived. (If they arrive.) Woman has large and dramatic nervous breakdown all over the mechanic’s floor but he doesn’t look too perturbed about it. He just says: sign here. Woman signs. Then goes home to spend the rest of the week shaking, crying and staring at the wall.


She sits in her flat and feels like her guts are falling out of her bottom, but they don’t. In fact, now that she thinks about it, nothing has fallen out of her bottom in quite awhile.


The Blouberg wind comes up. It blows in that specific way that makes her feel like her head might come off. In an effort to combat cabin fever she does go for a walk but the wind blows her hair up her nose and she almost chokes to death.


A couple of hours after she arrives back home, she realises that baby birds have hatched in an unreachable location on the other side of the wall and they squawk and scrape on the side of the house all day long. Her madness deepens to a new shade of purple.


The two old yappy dogs downstairs bark at her when she comes home, when she leaves and when the wind blows, which means that they bark all the time. The birds are not disturbed by the barking. Their feet scrape against the inside walls and Alice listens to them as they settle down wake up scuttle about scuttle and crawl. They wait for their mother to come back baring gifts and when she does all hell breaks loose. The wind slams doors closed. They bang like bombs down the street, and the wind howls with joy and goes looking for another.


This time a year ago Alice was packing her bags in New York City to go home. A year later, almost to the day, she’s packing them again.


Almost to the day.