After three weeks with the family in Perth, I was itching to shake off suburbia and make a beeline for the bush.
In order to make this happen, I started speaking, in deeply wistful terms, about the simple joys of camping – how pleasurable it would be to travel self-sufficiently, to be able to stop on a whim, to cook over open fires as our forefathers did, to be at one with the glorious outdoors!
Nowadays, my regular morning run finds me on a stunningly beautiful trail along the southernmost part of Western Australia’s Coral Coast. So distinctively itself, it has an unforgettable sense of place and reminds me of absolutely nowhere else I’ve been or seen.
It’s been many years since I last spent the better part of a day at the beach, swimming and picnicking. Sand-fringed Lake Leschenaultia is located in Chidlow, in the Perth Hills, in the Shire of Mundaring (sounds distinctly hobbity, doesn’t it?), only a 45-minute drive from the city of Perth.
In case you were wondering what the excuse was to drag Roy out of his comfort zone, it was granddaughter Holly’s third birthday today.
Of course, Christmas is all about celebrating family. (Unless you happen to be a Christian, in which case it might be about celebrating something else.)
So here I am with Roy, appropriately ensconced in the bosom of our family for the next month and more. We have our own self-contained guest suite – sounds a bit better than granny-flat, doesn’t it? – in the house of son Carl and his wife Carrie in Iluka, 30km north of central Perth, Western Australia.
How many Christmas cards did you get this year? I mean the genuine analogue kind: a festive card sealed in an envelope and delivered by the postman/person. Fewer than last year, I’d guess – and maybe a lot fewer than five or 10 years ago.
If you received one from Roy and Verne, custom-designed and postmarked Singapore, I must confess it had little to do with me. I would have joined the rest of the world and given up on this particular chore a long time ago. Roy, however, is not only CEO of household administration, but also a staunch traditionalist*.
* A jolly good thing when it comes to platinum wedding anniversaries and such. Roy has never forgotten our anniversary. When I did, once – around 15 years ago? – I was allowed to live, perhaps only so as to rue that dark day for the rest of my life.
Plenty. Durban has quite enough to keep me busy, and that’s the truth.
By comparison to my home town, Singapore is a major world city that offers just about every entertainment you could possibly think of – everything from world-class concerts and exhibitions to international sports events and more. New restaurants of every level and description, from hawker stalls where a meal costs around US$3 to global celebrity chef restaurants where you’ll easily pay $200 or even $300 a head. So, after our nearly 16 years in this amazing metropolis, am I missing all that? No, not really.
As Roy and I prepared to head off to Modimolle in Limpopo Province (previously Nylstroom in the Northern Transvaal) for Mathilda and Leon’s hugely enjoyable wedding a few weeks ago, I found myself questioning my cultural identity as an “English” South African. What does that strange expression even mean?
For white, English-speaking Durbanites, an invisible yet undeniable divide lies to the west of us – somewhere between 100 and 200 kilometres, I reckon – that separates us from the mainly Afrikaner hinterland. Julie Simpson calls it “the boerewors curtain”. (That’s why the Limpopo game-farm buck in the photo look so nervous; they know they’re only a stage away from biltong.)
There are occasions – even for a generally unholy lot like us – when it seems that only a church will do. For those times, our venerable institution of choice is the Parish Church of St Peter in Coughton, Warwickshire.
St Peter’s was where Roy’s sister Lyndsay wedded John Clemmow more than 30 years ago – both Lyndsay and her sister Cheryll had sung in its church choir – and it was there that our daughter, Wendy, was christened in 1980.
Durban’s not just about sun and surf – it’s also less than a two-hour drive from an agricultural hinterland that bristles with dozens of more-or-less-chi-chi farm stalls, handicrafts and cottage industries, craft breweries, hostelries, spas, cafés and restaurants. This bucolic wonderland is called the Midlands Meander, and what better destination for a couple of nights’ R&R with my sister Dale from London and our mutual BFF Julie?
Day One – of pork crackling, dental disasters and craft ales
