Continuing my journey to Africa, at Marseilles my parents and I boarded a Greek liner called the Corinthian. We set off across the Mediterranean on a ship with the euphemistic title of “luxury Liner,” which may have been very grand before the war but, in 1946, it had recently been decommissioned as a troop ship. […]
How many British 10-year-olds, having experienced the rigors and often terrors of World War II, were then propelled into over a year of travelling and, best of all, no school? In 1946, my parents decided that there would be better opportunities available in a country like South Africa, than in the aftermath of war-ravaged Britain. […]
After weeks of frustrating physical inactivity due to the madness of COVID-19, I found my mind casting back to times when I was hyperfit and tended to express this in exuberant, even foolish, ways. Before I met my wife Hero, I took a holiday at Cathedral Peak Hotel in the heart of the Drakensberg Mountains, […]
These blogs are virtually the first I’ve ever written and I have to say that, compared with the many other forms of writing I have attempted over the years, it’s proved to be an exhilarating exercise in free-form writing. Most of my writing career has been involved with much more structured forms, apart from poetry, […]
My third South African who was not content with the wide-open spaces and rolling plains of the Highveld that once teemed with game is Elon Musk. His name alone is enough to attract attention and it seems that he was endlessly bullied and teased at Pretoria Boys High. Born of a South African father Errol […]
The second of the three “starstruck” South Africans and the only one of them so far to actually go into space is Mark Shuttleworth. Like Johann Schutte, who grew up in a remote part of the country, Mark was born in Welkom, at the time a small country town in the Orange Free State on […]
What do you think that the small towns of Welkom and Lydenburg, as well as the city of Pretoria in South Africa, have to do with space travel? I’d be surprised if you get the connection. Some of you may know that Elon Musk, the Founder of SpaceX, was born in Pretoria, South Africa’s joint […]
Continuing on the theme of life under an authoritarian regime, it’s wonderful how people can find their way around seemingly impossible situations. As Apartheid in South Africa rightly brought about the wrath of sanctions from most other nations, its thriving economy began to suffer. In an attempt to keep lines of communication open with the […]
There are a growing number of discussions around the world on the subject of authoritarian states. The coronavirus has heightened these debates as elements of Orwell’s book 1984 are starting to manifest themselves. Keeping us in lockdown with all the ramifications of control that this entails, highlights concerns about “Big Brother” governments keeping us under […]
If nothing else, these last few weeks have been a time for reflection. That has allowed me to put attention on things that would probably never have occurred to me during the “normal” rush of daily working life pre-corona. So…I got to thinking about the relationship between the mind, body and spirit. Maybe some of […]