The whole point of being a creative writer, or a creative anything for that matter, is to have the freedom to create. I had earlier experienced the frustrations of advertising copywriting. This required writing to a usually quite vague brief, then be subjected to often devastating critiques by the account executive who had given the […]
When I arrived back in Durban, Dennis and I finished off the filming of my short film; then I spent a few weeks editing it. The finished product was not a bad effort. It was just a cute twelve-minute story about Kamal, a little boy who worked in an Indian restaurant every Friday after school […]
In my last blog, I had written that my little movie did get made. However, when we were almost finished with the filming, Dennis Bughwan apologized and said that for the next eight weeks, or so, he was totally tied up with his photographic work and other business matters. We would have to postpone everything […]
Just to wrap up the story of this segment of my life, I became more and more involved with the Indian community in Durban through the Bughwan family. So much so that Bobby Maharaj, Devi’s brother-in-law, who was a marvellous character and a keen tennis player, asked me to come and play a game of […]
I don’t mean to launch into my life story from this point, but I would like to continue with the events that developed after I had been fired from Lintas. I had a small amount of money to tide me over through the next couple of months, but clearly I needed to find work. Still […]
When I think back to the times that unexpected opportunities occurred out of the blue, I usually took them, blithely unaware of the future consequences, and luckily most of them turned out well. However, there were also opportunities that, had I taken them, my life would have been very different and in most cases the […]
We all seem to walk along a slippery path in life. Some slide off it more often than others. Some seemingly barely slip at all but move more slowly and rarely reach the other end of the path. Most of us have moments when a slip seems to be inevitable; but, somehow, we cling onto […]
I can hardly believe that this is my half century of blogs already. I have no idea whether you have enjoyed all of them or even some of them. What I have tried to do is to reach into past episodes of my life that I felt were interesting and often exciting. I have also […]
I initially tried something slightly different with this blog but, as usual, I ran it by my ever-patient wife Hero, whose reaction to all my writing is a wonderful barometer of how my words communicate to other people. She’s a tough cookie in this respect and never tells me that I’ve written something good if […]
I first visited Jersey in the Channel Islands in 1938, at the age of 2. Unlike many other people who cannot remember that far back, I do have a few memories of that time. My parents decided to leave Weybridge in Surrey, England to live in Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, close to the […]