Baa Baa Black Sheep, have you any wool? I need it for an email.

On Monday morning I couldn’t remember where to switch on my laptop and I started at the microwave. I had to re-learn how to use a mouse pointer, it was like watching a game of badly played pinball on screen.

It has been a tough week, my first week back after 3 weeks.

This holiday my husband decided that he wanted to do a very different holiday to what we have done in the past. We have done the beach holidays, the bush holidays, the touring holidays, the city-scape holidays, and the bundu bashing camping, but this year he had the ingenious idea of going to a Karoo sheep farm, devoid of any human activity, shade, mobile signal, wi-fi or any regular activity like restaurants and shops. Apparently, all these things are what keep us “wired” and stressed – I could have done without the no shade part.

We spent 10 days in a little cottage on a working sheep farm very far away from the homestead, and the only company we had that were in the land of the living were sheep and some scorpions we won’t speak of here.

I learnt a lot about sheep, I learnt there isn’t a lot to learn mostly. I learnt that sheep are not smart, they dig holes for no reason at all other than for digging them, and they really do follow each other everywhere even if it means imminent danger of falling of a cliff or drowning. I also learnt that sheep don’t know how to find shade, like my husband.

Said husband wanted to eat Karoo lamb for breakfast, lunch and for dinner and his first endeavor when we got to the farm was to buy an entire lamb from the farmer. I am a vegetarian.

We switched off to the point where we did so little I felt like I was in some sort of weird holiday induced coma – the only thing we had to think about (ok fine, argue about) each day was which direction we were going to walk in, as you can imagine, this did become treacherous at times as we had no idea where we were and some days we walked up to 18kms in the blazing Karoo sun discussing how we will get Netflix to document the “I shouldn't be alive” series of us and what they will call it. I was crawling behind and slowly looking for different places on the farm where I could dispose of my husbands body discreetly.

We read books (a lot of books!), we baked ourselves like terracotta pots in the sun (far too much to be considered healthy), we ate very basic food (I wasn’t going to turn into Jan Braai), and we didn’t talk that much – unless the sheep had something to say, which they never did - not useful things anyway. It was blissful and a total switch off.

But now I have to report that very sadly this week, I am a completely useless member of society and have no value to add to man nor beast. I am having to start at the bottom again, work my way up the corporate ladder and figure out how day to day activities that were second nature to me before, like how Teams calls work and how to type an email to an actual human being that has to actually find it legible on the other end. Apparently "Baaa Baa Black Sheep, have you any wool?", doesn't quite cut it.?

I am hoping and very confident that I am going to rise like a phoenix from the ashes next week and have so much energy and feel so rejuvenated that I am going to take 2022 and turn it into something extraordinary (I know I will actually) – but right now for this week, if you are on a Teams call with me and I start bleating like a sheep, it shall pass, sadly like all amazing holidays have too!