In 1982, on a bus trip between Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles (three days and three nights), I got talking to one of the drivers, an African American. We discussed sport, mostly rugby versus American football. Then he said, “Guess who I think is the greatest athlete in the world today?” Bearing in mind that […]
Harry worked on the gold mines in South Africa all his life. He had three children and a loving wife; they lived in the unfashionable suburb of Rosettenville in Johannesburg. Despite his modest income, he somehow managed to send his two sons to St. John’s College, one of the top five private schools in South […]
I’ve written about my wife, Hero,and her interesting family before. This time I want to focus on how, even now, she confronts and handles tough situations. Hero is an ordained church minister and has performed countless weddings, funerals and naming ceremonies over the years. Many of the wedding ceremonies have been non-denominational or for couples […]
I had a very unexpected emotional experience last night. In June, as I have mentioned, my wife Hero and I moved from West Sussex to a large retirement complex on the outskirts of Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. We had mixed feelings about moving into a place where the youngest age permitted to live here is […]
Having extolled the virtues of some successful men and women I have known, I thought it might be fun, in contrast, to recall a couple of moments in my life that resulted in uproarious, deep belly laughs. Verbal humor can be funny if cleverly conceived, but often enough it can be silly. I confess to […]
I had intended to include two ladies in my previous blog but the boundless activities of Prue Leith escaped onto the pages and I decided to cut the blog into two. In about 1961, I ended up stage managing two plays in Durban after having failed to secure the job of 2nd Unit Director for […]
I think what has fascinated me most about meeting young people is discovering what they are planning to do with their lives. And then, best of all, discovering that they have achieved and sometimes exceeded their goals. After working in television in Britain for three years, I returned to South Africa in late 1959. My […]
Rummaging around in the memory bin of my mind, I’m trying to find stuff I haven’t written about before but is nevertheless part of my life, which for better or worse has been the central theme of my blogs. I haven’t written all these anecdotes for self-aggrandizement, but rather as a commentary on people and […]
When I was first asked to do a blog on the ExoTech website, I was both excited and apprehensive. I had never written an ongoing series of blogs before and wasn’t at all sure what I should write about. Eventually, I have simply written about events that have touched my life in many different places, […]
Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about what constitutes success. It seems to me that it means many things to many people, but the majority of us strange creatures called humans seem to focus on wealth as our yardstick. At the height of the Victorian era, class was more the criterion but, of […]