Zoë Life

The lively one

By now many of my regular readers will be well-acquainted with the Midgley family in Madagascar, and their kids in particular. The eldest, and most outspoken of them is Andrew, who was born way back (for him anyway) in 1999. In the same year some mutual friends, the Deans, who now reside in a tiny backwoods, backward place called Springs, in South Africa, had a little girl by the name of Zoë, which apparently means "Life" in Greek... She suffers from verbal diarrhoea (she even talks in her sleep) but has nevertheless brought much vitality into everyone's lives that she has touched. 

She's always been "different" to the norm, but then, the whole family is. Here are some of the things that make her so bizarre, so not-so-sane-in-Springs...

She says she's "biwingual" - she speaks English and Afrikaans.  A few weeks ago she bought a packet of fizz-pops candy with two flavours in one packet. "Hey, it's a biwingual packet of candy!" she said. She calls feathers "bird leaves"; only found out last year that she lives in South Africa, and not the USA; thinks that all meat is chicken and calls her fringe (bangs) her sideburns.

But the most delightful thing about Zoë is that for years she has told me that if I never manage to find a wife that she'll marry me one day "if she has to". Her older sister, the one with a black cat attached to her shoulder like a character from "the Addams Family", told me today that it is looking increasingly probable, despite their every attempt to "set me up".