One of the most fascinating things I find about Grahamstown is how much of "social hot spot" our local grocery store is.  There is not a huge amount of choice in terms of where one can shop, but there is a firm favourite in town, which at times is SO busy, you would swear you were in the central shopping district of downtown Chicago.
When I first arrived here, I once (and only once) made the fatal error of thinking that I would shoot into town, whip into the store, scoop up some groceries and nip home, without a stitch of make up on, and my hair looking rather dishevelled.  I think it was the largest mistake I have made in my 39 years of existence.  As Murphy and his luck would have it, I bumped into every living being I had ever met here, who ALL gave me an "oh dear she has gone to seed already" look, before moving swiftly on to the next aisle, or wherever it was that I was not.

Since then, I have accepted that this retailer is the place to see and be seen; a most definite area of social networking, and, that there are more dinner arrangements made in the cheese aisle than there are via telephone, e-mail, Facebook or Twitter.

With this in mind, having to drop in for groceries yesterday before collecting my daughter from ballet, I made sure my hair was done, my make-up pristine, and that my "hold it all in" pantihose were firmly where I needed them to be.
I was all dressed up and pushing my trolley around with the perfect poise - chin up, shoulders back, my sunglasses on my head, Jackie Kennedy style.  However, I bumped into no-one I knew.  I was, quite literally, devastated.  All dressed up nowhere to go.

Feeling rather deflated, I drove back to the farm with my six year old ballerina, and started trundling my plastic packets laden with groceries into our kitchen.  Luckily for me, my daughter was outside feeding the little chicks, with my fiancee keeping an eye on her to ensure that the chicks were not force-fed their crushed oats.  Our cook was kindly helping me with the carting process, and had left her washing up to go out to my car.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement.  I stopped and looked, and lo and behold, a long brown snake was heading along the floor towards me.  In quite the most unladylike fashion, I dropped my groceries and screamed at the top of my voice "SNAKE, SNAKE".  My daughter screamed for our cook, who climbed into my car, taking cover.  I kept thinking about the only bit of advice I have ever really been given about this type of a situation "never leave a snake" - one should ALWAYS stay to watch it and see where it goes.  I am afraid, I couldn't.  My heart was rummaging around in my throat, the snake was approaching me, the beautiful "Pink Lady apples" were lying smashed and bruised on the floor, and my prescence in the kitchen was history.

My fiancee decided to take matters into his own hands and ran inside with his father's old walking stick; he bellowed to me to come and help him and show him the snake, so I knew I had no choice, I had to face this fear.  I ran in after him and... NO SNAKE.  The damn thing was gone.  After a suitable dressing down about never leaving a snake (blah blah), we knew for certain that 1) the snake was somewhere in our kitchen and 2) we had to find it.

After a lot of convincing me to stay, we decided to take a chance and SLOWLY move the tumble dryer away from the wall... and there it was - angry and clearly not in a good mood - the brown, long reptile.  It reared it's head at which point I thought that life as I knew it was not worth living.  After somewhat of a fight, the dreaded snake (a Cobra), met with a quick ending.  In the classics, this would be called "death by walking stick".

The moral of the story here - clearly my lesson is that instead of thinking I am Eve, happily living in the Garden of Eden with my Adam, I need to remember there are apples (no longer good enough for consumption) and there are snakes, and somehow, down here, they all seem to collide at once.