Chris and his Waterpolo Team

Shew the season is finally over, but what fun for the parents, the boys had to work really hard though - they trained 3 times a week, played matches on the 4th day, giving them one day off a week, but that in the last 3 weeks has been taken up by Rugby practices.

Their team did exceptionally well this term, being undefeated except for one match and made it through to the semi-finals of interschools tournament. The semi's were against SACS, Rondebosch and Reddam.

Wynberg drew with SACS only to loose in the penalty shootout, but we are all still very proud of them.

Bikes have been stolen

Can you believe it, but we have had yet another break-in and they have stolen Rob's, Chris and Morten (my brother's) bikes.

Here is a copy of my letter I sent to our local newspaper.

On Monday afternoon my youngest son came to ask me where the bikes have gone? After realising he was not joking we discovered that 3 adult bikes were stolen from our property. The bicycle's were mounted against a wall, chained and padlocked together.

We have 3 dogs on the property that bark at anything that moves outside our walls and we can only assume that since we are on a corner plot, the thieves must have distracted the dogs at one side oft he property whilst the remaining thieves jumped the wall, took their time to negotiate through a huge mountain of things in front of the bicycles (we had just emptied out our house to have our floors done), taken bolt cutters to cut the chain, removed the chain threaded through 5 bikes (imagine the noise), each attached to hooks on the wall, then lifted the bikes off their hooks and carried them over the wall.

The bikes are insured so that is not the problem, what makes me so ANGRY is the invasion of my personal space, the fact that my youngest child last night was worried about them coming back and spent the evening creating his own booby trap to catch the 'bad buys' On top of all this we have visitors from overseas (people that left the country because of amongst other things, crime) that have had to experience this.

Although we have a highly sophisticated alarm system, intruder proof glass, burglar bars etc, we are now going to install beams across our property at huge, unexpected and unbudgeted for cost, for peace of mind and to create one more layer between us and THEM!!. The inconvenience and time taken to resolve this issue with having to take time off work to go and report it tot he police, contact the insurance company and get quotes for replacement of the bikes is able to be quantified, but the emotional damage to my children and myself is unable to be quantified, let alone my husband who is overseas and having to deal with this remotely, worrying that his family are safe, all it does is fuel my anger towards criminals in this country. Why is it that we the public are made to continuously pay and pay and pay, yet our country cannot even provide us consistently with 2 SAPS vans per sector as they are allegedly supposed to do.

This incident - my 5th in the past 6 years has made me suspicious of any person walking around our neighbourhood that doesn't look as though he belongs, as this was clearly a planned theft, in that they must have had spotters checking out the lay of the land and planned how they were going to do it. We often have people ring our bell, offering to sell us stuff, begging, looking for work etc. THIS IS THE REASON WE PATROL AND ARE INVOLVED WITH OUR NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH.

I personally will be doing everything I can to support the proposed Constantiaberg CID as this is the only way to create a 'Virtual Fence' around our suburbs with monitored cameras, adding one more layer to the security of my family.

Message from Rob in India [Calcutta]

I am looking forward to going to Dubai tomorrow as it is quite a bit more civilized than this place, but it has been interesting here, and I think we have got some good possibilities. It is just such a big market that we almost don't know where to start.

It is really backward as well and we should send some of our 'folkes' here to see what real poverty is. The amount of people living on the streets is shocking. You also just do not see fat people here apart from int he high end business areas, which are very much like what we are used to, but the rest is just one big slum.

I have also never seen so many taxis in my life. They are everywhere - in Calcutta, they use a car called a Hindustani ambassador, which is basically an Austin from the late 1950's, that when it went out of production in the UK, the plant was s hipped here and it is apparently still being made 60 years later. They must have been really good cars, because I think some of the ones that we have ridden in are 30 or 40 years old and although they are completely battered and *(^&(&(&*, they still go without puffing out loads of smoke.

In Mumbai they also use such an old car, but it is a Fiat from the same era- imagine being subjected to being transported in this when the temperature is 40C and there is no aircon, and the average speed of the traffic is about 12km/h wherever you go.

The hotel that I am staying in is only about a year old and although basic clean and suits my requirements and has 24hr room service, so we were able to get supper at 00h30 this am when we got back from Mumbai.

I have taken some pictures with my cellphone, so you can get an idea. [to follow]

The cricket at Eden Gardens was fantastic on Tuesday Evening.

Drinking our daily dose of Fruit and Veg

Cannot believe I did not know about this before, but you can drink your fruit and veggies . . .

Brent and Eloise are staying with us from England and have very kindly bought us our very own juicer. Our first jungle juice had spinach, beetroot, lemon, oranges, apples and cucumbers and tasted wonderful. Both boys drank it as well, just think of all that goodness!!!

Then last night I am driving home from fetching Chris and James phones to ask if he can make some apple juice for himself - WHAT A PLEASURE!!! Finally my child that doesn't often eat fruit is wanting to make it for himself.

THANK YOU BRENT AND ELOISE!!!