When we used to visit my grandparents in Witsands, Western Cape, during the September holidays my grandmother Thomasina would take out a carving knife on Sunday mornings and go down to the chicken run. In those days Witsands was a small traditional fishing village on the Breede River. The chicken run had a huge open space in front of it that looked across to an old “BP” double-decker bus that someone had converted into a holiday home. Anyway, my grandmother would select a chicken from the chicken “hok”, tuck it under her arm and cut its head off. She would place the wildly fluttering bird on the ground and it would run with its head off, blood spurting through its neck around the open piece of gravel yard until it keeled over and died. My grandmother had beautiful blue eyes and when she was in this mischievous mood to scare us “city boys” she would chuckle loudly at our horror of seeing the whole gruesome episode. Continue reading “Do we need all these “box” metaphors for the creative process?”
