Resurfacing... light, air, water.

It's been a month where the corporate has crowded out much (but not all) of the personal - but like so much of life that one is tempted to wish away, out of anxiety (in my case), or other perceived challenges - loneliness on the road etc - it turned out to be pretty cool.

Learned some interesting stuff.  Met some deeply fascinating folk.  Saw a number of people I love and miss.  During this time, if you'll forgive me for a quick grandpa George digression - May arrived with an absolute vengeance.  Heat and beauty shimmering together.  It's been exceptionally clear - better air quality than Cape Town and Charlottesville,Virginia - and exceptionally hot.  On Wednesday just past, it was 36.7 degrees - which is the hottest day in May since records started here 130 years ago.  Someone died hiking, and there is a (surprisingly ignored) water shortage (25% of normal rainfall this year so far, Kevin told me, though adding that the city could catch that up with one early typhoon. Fair point. Provided it happens).  Either way, I've been out of the house early on my bike every day this week except today - the sabbath you know - and into the ocean for a long and lovely swim - before a massive sweat home up the hill from the Clearwater Bay 2 beach.  Sadly the camera on my phone has died and I've failed to prioritize a new one, so I'm super-thin on photos.  That's probably because I've been unusually OBSESSED with bicycles of late - should I be worried?  Anyway, I have a US ride reasonably well on its way - couple of tiny challenges, but route and gear largely sorted (if you have time to wait, the internet is a freakishly fantastic thing for obscurity and price discovery - been buying teeny little bits and pieces from far-flung places and building the touring bike bit by bit - some of it super exotic (for example second hand cyclocross shifters built by a company called The Goats of Gevenalle - I kid you not ... how good is that pun?)  I also decided that I've been working too much and not doing anything creative - never a good habit that, in my view - so I'm making some bicycle t-shirts using laser printed transfers.  I think I should get into silk screening - looks relatively easy to do in monochrome - but messy, and space hungry.  There are a wealth of fantastic images on the web to consider.  Included here are two of the things I've constructed - the bike below is by a company called Horse - a thing of beauty.

I was also looking at some bicycle revolution posters, there are some that are immensely cool like this one below.  Skid competition - used to love those back-pedal brake bikes - build up a massive speed, stomp that break, and sliiiiide:

The other thing I noticed was this teacher who created a course in social change, and the focus of the project was making a city bicycle friendly.  Here is the article about it in Forbes .  Makes me wonder wtf is wrong with South Africans - you could not get a better climate for cycling to work and back than Pretoria - for example - and yet there is no consciousness at all about it.  Compare that to London or Melbourne where huge numbers of people rely on bikes.  I don't get it.  What I do get is that is why so many people are so angry half the time.  Bikes sort that stuff out, chop chop. Make people laugh and smile and trust.

Special stuff on different sides of the till

Been out on the blue machine, swimming in the sea prework - lordy it is PERFECT.  These are both absolutely cool, but for very different reasons and different size holes in the pocket.  More forthcoming, but in case you are getting bitten, you can see the top one here (great website btw, pinion gears, frame breaker, etc).  The one below I love because it is a home job conversion on a 100,000 km Surly Trucker - still the best bike built for the purpose - and within pretty much anyone's reach who is determined to have one.

20 years ago today

What spurred the blast-from-the-pasts that follow this post?  Ange and I have been married for 20 years today - which is surprising and amazing.  I wanted to find some wedding photos - but they are all pre-digital - so I had to rummage around in boxes - everything is mixed up, but thankfully mostly well preserved.  And finding them led to finding a million others - a blizzard of memories that aren't my daily consciousness.  But what I set out to find was one of these, for this day:

Before

I've always loved cameras, but have had patches without owning one, having gone without or occasionally been lucky enough to borrow one.  I've also been given photos along the way - and have managed to keep those, somehow, with a million moves.  There's something special about a photo - this blast of memory, or perhaps the shaping of a memory... at some point one never knows.

In the Transkei in 1987.  School's out.

On the Zambezi with Uni mates in the early 90s - wild and fantastic trip to Zimbabwe, though got wildly ill from the river too.  This photo lay in a box in the heat or damp at some point, and somehow had writing transferred to it.  Digital fix? Nah.

Servicing my tourning bike on Anne and Hanlie's farm in Salt River.  One of my favorite places of all time - and two of the best and most fantastic people I have ever met.

Heading out off the beach at St Francis Bay in the late 80s - a photo courtesy of  Rose.  It was such a rush to be out there - intimidating, desolate, lonely; fantastically thrilling.  Some time after this photo I broke the universal joint coming in.  Big George was pretty grumpy, but dutifully drove us 3+ hours one way to PE to buy another.

Fishing on the Boteti river in Botswana 1990 (or thereabouts)

Big George fishing for Bass near the Island in Retvlei, mid 80s.  This was the worst camera I owned, ever; possibly 30% of its photos came out properly.  I had a better one at first, but then it was stolen in a burglary at 121 - this was the shocker that the insurance company replaced it with.  (I may have been complicit in requesting it, because it was  a beautiful bright yellow - a poor criteria it turns out.

In the Moremi in Botswana - early morning, desert cold, many many days without bathing - Sean Doherty sitting next to me on the upended trommel. 

Vac job working at UNISA's tech servicing center in the late 80s.  They had all sorts of cool kit that came in for repairs and had to be tested.  Including this dual frame Polaroid camera that took two photos on the same plate.

Hiking with Simon Oz and Keith Burman, on the mission to nowhere in the Franshoek mountains in 88.  The next day I was to be bitten properly, on the thigh, by a Rottweiler, whilst walking out of a farm after speaking to the farmer.  It was an unforgettable experience.  "Sorry.  It doesn't like strangers".

Ange, early Prolit days

Ange in around 96.

Ange waiting at the stop-go on a road in the Northern Cape. Ange's dad lent us his truck and we drove to Kleinzee, where her aunt and uncle lived.  It was fantastic to be out of the city and in the big empty Northern Cape spaces; towns like Kuruman and Pofadder.

Ange in Knysna, 1998

This photo I took at the school, inside the prison perimiter at Leeukop.  The authorities were not hugely keen on photos, but in the context, a graduation party towards the end of the two year project, they turned a blind eye.  It's a poignant photo for me because the woman standing in the middle is Rosemary Lindner, who I worked with at Prolit over a period of seven years.  She was old-school lefty, had had a difficult and jarring life, and could also be a handful at times.  She was however seriously committed and caring.  Tragically she would be murdered some years later.  

With Sam Moleko in one of the spotless prison classrooms.  If I remember correctly Sam was a Big 5, and I saw him next some years later, on the cover of the Mail and Guardian newspaper, where he was photographed as an armed guard at a taxi rank, during a period of taxi violence and conflict.  

I was at the prison during the mornings, and taught literacy at Ikageng night centre during some of the evenings.  This ended up being a professional pivot for me.  From this point on I only worked in adult education (though later on that was in the context of teacher training and supporting schools).

In 1997 I was promoted in Prolit, the job being to move (back, in my case) to Cape Town, to set up and open an office there.  It was a big ask of Ange because it meant walking away from a successful restaurant business, and looking for a job cold.  In the end that journey was tough, initially she worked as a maid for a wealthy woman in Bishopscourt, then through rough edged commercial opportunities in food factories out near Muizenberg, and in the kitchens of Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital in Mitchell's Plain.  Thereafter she worked at Eziko Cooking and Catering Training Center in Langa.  She gave a lot, learned a lot, met some riveting people.  For example Godfrey, old-school revolutionary, educated in Russia, had been on the Island.  In so many ways this was new learning for us - these were just not people you were ever exposed to in the Apartheid world we grew up in.   Eziko is still there.  This photo is on the road to Riebeek Kasteel, it was great to be close to space, though we lived in close, mildly insane and at times underworldly neighborhoods.

Part of my job in Cape Town was to work with Koort Trahms and Wim Slabbert, of Kagiso Publishers.  They were hard-core traditionalists: you need to go to Namibia to sell books, so you load up the Venter trailer with books and then you drive to Namibia, very very fast (where the road allows).  The camera couldn't handle the glare out front, but the road looked exactly like ...

...it did out the back of the car.

At night they braaied, were well organised in an uncomplicated and effective way.  We stayed in rooms along our route that had braai's.  Inside was usually one big room with three or more single beds (intergalactic snoring), a kitchenette, and then a bathroom with a toilet (thunderous farting and shitting). They had a massive joi de vivre, roared with laughter at jokes, and told outrageously colorful stories.  They were great company.

Packing up, quick cup of coffee before hitting the road again.

On the beach with Roy and Ruth, Ange and Geordie - who has always been eccentric, some times quietly so, very groovy and divine person.

Two and a half years into Cape Town, I got another promotion that entailed moving back to Pretoria.  This pic taken somewhere near Franshoek on the way down.

We moved back into the same garden cottage we had been living in when we left Pretoria.  Ange called the person who owned it on a whim and asked whether it was occupied - and they said not.  It was a small but divine space, tucked away at the back of a long driveway.

Ange toiling happily in the garden. It seemed to grow with immense enthusiasm, often overtaking us.

You in the pool at 121 - planes, planes, planes - weird underwater.

You on my bike outside 121.  Photo-damage trashing the paintwork, alas.

Always fishing - this time in the river running through a farm-school that Sean O'Connor was working at, somewhere out towards the Magaliesberg

Steve and Jacqui

From these times four B&Ws I love.

Catching sun in the back courtyard of 46 Polo Road

Wild Geordie and George walking away from St Francis, towards the Krom rivier, late 80s.

Ange getting ready - not taken by me, and am unsure by who.

Wim Slabbert, bookseller and gentleman, on the side of the road in Namibia somewhere.

From these times, three colour photos I love

The Karoo.  Utterly uniquely fantastic a place.

My cousins, at St Francis Bay

Having convinced them to pose, Wim Slabbert, Koort Trahms and me, Namibia, 1998