'A good traveller has no fixed plans.' Tao Te Chiang
The other day I received a renewal notice, from a professional association I belong to – or belonged to, I should say. Normally – in the old normal – I would have renewed my membership without much thought, but this time I hesitated. It was not so much the money – over $100 – though […]
‘Ah, but your land is beautiful’ is the third novel by Alan Paton, the South African author best known for ‘Cry, the Beloved Country.’ Telling tales of apartheid and resistance, the title is an ironic reflection on the perception so often and so blindly voiced by visitors to this country – ‘you live in such […]
After 4 1/2 years in Parkmore Gardens, in suburban banal and exhausting Johannesburg, we are striking camp. The stuff we want to keep is on its way, first by road to the coast, then onto a ship, via Rotterdam to Toronto. The stuff we don’t want to keep, or really don’t need, is in the […]
Fans of David Attenborough’s will know that a lot of stuff goes on in that liminal, shape-shifting zone where the tide steadily, daily, breathes in and breathes out, where the percussion of seashells follows the outgoing waves as they withdraw down the beach, where the turtle’s eggs are laid in the sand and the small […]
My wife made me do it. Last year Rob entered a selection of her collages for the Joburg Fringe exhibit, and much to her delight one of her pieces, Rare, was accepted – you’ll find it here, in the 2020 catalogue. We went to see the show of course, and there it was, in pride […]
Madikwe is my happy place, my daughter likes to say. And indeed, when we arrived at our lodge at Mooifontein, the week before last, all the cares in the world seemed to just fall away. The four hour cruise up the N4 from Johannesburg, the half hour drive along dirt roads through the reserve, the […]
We don’t call it Fall, here in South Africa. We do it the English way. We call it autumn. Be that as it may, fall has arrived, including this morning an unseasonal thunderstorm and rain. It’s not just the weather that is changing, folks, it’s the climate, as you know of course, unless you’ve had […]
If time is a river, it is a river with rapids and falls. We snipped another month off our wall calendar on Saturday, the first day of May, leaving just four months to go before we pack up and leave our house in Johannesburg and begin the long journey home, to Toronto. The calendar now […]
Private loss and public pain. Not the same, and not commensurate, but both laying emotional and mental claim. Reminders that we do not control events, that life has a way of breaking through our seemingly ordered universe and seemingly predictable lives. That gratitude and humility fit better with reality than hubris or bravado, that our […]
If you have been following along on Facebook on our 3700km road trip through the small towns of the Karoo, the Western Cape and all the way back to Johannesburg, you will have been following a story written partly in pictures – pictures taken, not for the photography but for the story, and on an […]
