Feeling richer than we had been for time, we took a train up into the Engedine Valley to hopefully stay a night or two with Frau Zamboni in Bevers. She had been our landlady ten years previously when my parents and I stayed in the little village for about eight months, waiting for our ship to leave from Marseilles.
The Loire Valley is a particularly beautiful part of rural France. It was hard to imagine that only ten years previously, the ravages of World War II had just ended. Cities like London, Paris – and even worse, Dresden – still bore the scars of the devastating bombing on both sides.
We spent a wonderful couple of months in St. Helier, capital of Jersey. We were loaned a tent by the lady in charge of the local Girl Guides and camped on her lawn. She didn’t supply us with any Girl Guides but spoiled us rotten in other ways, such as with samples of her delicious home cooking. We both found jobs in the only genuine coffee bar in town, operating the Gaggia coffee machine. …
The transition from the “wild west” town of Walvis Bay surrounded by the Namib Desert on three sides and the Atlantic Ocean on the other, to the relative peace and calm of my birthplace – Weybridge in Surrey, England – was quite dramatic.
How has the world changed in 87 years? That’s the length of time I’ve driven this body around the planet, I’m going to make some observations and break them up into various periods according to what was happening in my life at the time.
I am in the process of doing a final edit for the third novel of my Willjohn Trilogy. My publisher has been delayed for family reasons and the proposed date of November for the launch of Surviving Treachery is now postponed to March 2024.
After writing the previous blog, I thought about the whole subject of migration, colonization, land ownership and reparations. If a group or even a nation is demanding reparations, how far back does one go and is it fair to do so?
At one stage, the Portuguese were a great seafaring nation. They explored many undiscovered parts of the world and were the first recorded European nation to land on the southern part of Africa. Diogo Cão put up a stone cross on the west coast in 1486. The cross still remains at the area, bordering on the Namib desert, known as Cape Cross. Bartolomeu Diaz put up another cross on the shoreline of the Eastern Cape in 1487.
For many generations the United States has been the mecca for the dispossessed. What most people don’t know is that South Africa has also been a haven for immigrants, both legal and illegal, since the 1600s.
I’m not normally a person who is obsessed with ‘what ifs?’ In hunting around for a theme for this week’s blog, I decided to trace my life back and speculate on what may have occurred if what actually happened hadn’t happened!