When you wake at 3:00 in the morning (as I regularly do), the silence is so absolute it’s unnerving. I can hear the heating element in the geyser percolating, roiling the water, modifying thermal subtleties. Dew dripping from a neighbour’s gutter is like the rhythmic beating of a metronome. In this profound absence of sound,…
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It’s the end of Lent (when, theoretically, one has been thoroughly abstemious and earnestly reflective), and the beginning of Easter (which Covid-19 has just roundly cancelled). Today our South African Lockdown has been extended to the end of April. Five Weeks. We’ve only just managed to gasp our way through two. So … Reflection, yes,…
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If you don’t look closely enough, you’d never believe that a small tourism-based village such as Knysna in fact followed some highly fashionable trends in its earlier building styles. I’m talking specifically here the period between the 1920s and 1930s. I’m talking Art Deco. It’s an architectural trend that was coined after an international exhibition…
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It struck me one day that if, while wandering through Knysna, you look upwards at the gables and lintels and parapets, there is still so much history, so many stories, bound up in the curves and columns and straight lines. I was so intrigued that early one morning, armed with my camera, I set off to…
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With a new adventure happening in Toronto, we’ve just spent some time getting to know the city. It’s been great fun, and so far we like what we see. Here is a brief sense of our first impressions, and a little flavour of the city. (No snow in this particular Blog Post, but there was…
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We’re in the middle of a new adventure, visiting Toronto, Canada, in spite of it being entirely the wrong season to venture into this icy northern territory! Canadians we meet are constantly joking that we must have come for the weather. (Minus 15 degrees C some days …) And yet, there is still magic to…
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Somehow hippos have made their way into a Central Park playground. In spite of our December African blue skies, burning sun … and the blasted Southeasters! … my thoughts have been wandering to colder climes, considering that new adventure prowling stealthily in the wings, ready to pounce like a snow leopard, in 2020. When we…
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The call of the Spotted Eagle-Owl is one of those typical owl sounds that appear again and again in mythology, fairy tales and spooky stories — and it’s also one of the cries we make when we’re happy. As in Whoo-hoo! It’s the December holidays! And Thesen Islands has just celebrated the third brood of…
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… with apologies to the original song by Dinah Washington (and Natalie Cole). “… what a difference a day makes, Brought the sun and the flowers, Where there used to be rain … There’s a rainbow before me” The singer was talking about the effects of love and kisses, but I’m talking mountains and weather….
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Oh, man, I’ve just had so much fun at Knysna’s first-ever Film Festival. I know, I know, the programme and movie scheduling was really complicated (it put a lot of people off), the handling of tickets was organised chaos, the venues were spread out all over town. But, honestly, the standard and quality of the…
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