'A good traveller has no fixed plans.' Tao Te Chiang
Traveling at Sixty was the topic of my last post – a post about slow travel, about taking the time to observe and relax, think and reflect. Now, a week later, we are on our way back, after nearly two-and-a-half weeks on the road and over 2000 km (so far) on the clock, with a […]
Traveling at sixty – 67, to be precise – is a much slower affair than it used to be. This is partly by choice, by design, but also by force of circumstance. The chief circumstance, Covid, is of course much more than circumstantial. It is an Act of God, a force of nature, something that […]
BERT – the Big Easter Road Trip – is at last under way (Bert was my paternal grandfather’s real name, by the by – we called him Pooch). We have mapped out the trip in easy four-to-five hour driving segments, starting this morning from Johannesburg, heading south on the N1 to Bloemfontein, to spend our […]
All happy families, Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, resemble one another. If this is true, then families who share in the kind of happiness we enjoyed on a family trip to Montagu, in the Western Cape, in December 2014, are happy indeed. Rob and I had flown out from Toronto, Jonnie and Hayley were visiting […]
We all see this every day: headlines that scream, ‘Five things you should stop doing right now!’ ‘Three things you need to know.’ ‘Scared of the stock market? Do this today!’ And on and on and on, from all corners, all comers, every wannabe pundit and pretend journalist and (groan) aspirant ‘influencer.’ Who are these […]
Rob and I agree, there is something unreal about our lives right now. This odd sense of unreality rests, uneasily, on a simple fact: after more than four years of living in South Africa, we are just six months away from packing up our rented townhouse in Johannesburg, moving out and – Covid willing – […]
If I have been remiss lately in posting my photographs, here are two images from an ongoing series on rural Ontario, with the promise that there will be more to follow. And just to mix things up, here is a teeny weeny poem from my Lost Poetry project. Words and pictures, folks, words and pictures! […]
The Road We Travel I think about the road we travelled, How it all seemed so serene – The sun shone down, like no tomorrow, On timeless hills and fields of shimmering green. Yet there was work to do, and cares to manage, Your sick child never really out of mind. This journey too would […]
In 1972 I became a first-year student at the University of Cape Town, an epochal event that may or may not have had something to do with the fact that massive student protests broke out that year at white, liberal, English-speaking campuses across the country. While the events at UCT, and Wits, and the other […]
Once upon a time – it was a dark and stormy night, as I recall, my poor heart in turmoil, my tongue let loose upon the world in verse and worse – once upon a time, when I was younger, quite a lot younger in fact, and of course much less sensible than I am […]
