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Granger Bay Boulevard runs from the ocean alongside the Waterfront complex to Main Road in Green Point. Where it crosses Beach Road, on one side are the buildings of Somerset Hospital and on the other side a five/six storey derelict building, that looks like it has been possessed by the dispossessed. The grounds are usually littered with rubbish, and I can imagine that a typical affluent international tourist on the way to Water Front could be feel rather intimidated by the neighbourhood.

The road continues past the Fort Wynyard military complex to the rear of the Cape Town Stadium. Across the road is another block of land that has been taken over by the homeless, with shacks made of wood, tin, plastic and cardboard, and the area strewn with rubbish.

But jointly or severally we have walked this road at least once a week for the part 5-6 years and never encountered a single problem, until Friday 16 September, when I was alone and felt a sickening thud on back of my head. I knew nothing further until I found myself on a concrete bench beside the Stadium. I could see nobody around and I still had my backpack, but I didn’t want to check if I had been robbed. I decided to walk to a wall at McDonalds, but I have no recollection of getting there. But I do remember finding nothing missing from my backpack. It was then I realized that I was bleeding heavily from my head. I needed to get home to get cleaned up.

I guess that I had concussion, because I wanted to order an Uber, but I could not remember where I lived. Somehow, I managed to walk home and our security immediately saw that I was in a mess and called for an ambulance. I got in the elevator, but again I couldn’t remember where my apartment was. Security took me to my door and a few minutes later an ambulance arrived.  I was taken to the Christian Barnard hospital.

For the next two or three days, all was a bit of a blur. I was convinced that I had been mugged, but as I had not been robbed and there were no witnesses, the doctors assumed that I had tripped, had a blackout, or had another stroke. A chunk of my hair was shaved off, so that the laceration on my head could be stapled. Similarly, my left knee and right ankle were bandaged. As I had a previous history of having had a stroke, had previously had a blackout, and I was on my own – Lotta was in Sweden visiting her parents, the doctor did not feel that I could be released under the circumstances, and I was placed in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), under observation. 

I was subjected to a battery of tests, to the end of identifying the cause of my collapse. The only suspect was a narrowing of the artery to leads to my right leg, and while there, the surgeon inserted two stents, as a precautionary measure.

In the meantime, Lotta had been made aware and had returned as soon as she could get a flight. The next day she walked the area to see if she could find any witnesses to my assault. She found some construction workers who had seen two thugs hit me on the head from behind with something heavy. They had shouted and chased them away and left me on a bench near the stadium. Knowing myself, I probably thanked them and assured them that I would be fine.

When Lotta reported this to me and to the doctors, I felt a great sense of relief. It had really bothered me that in future, I could be walking along on one of my pilgrimages and suddenly have a blackout. The fact that the doctors had found nothing obviously amiss, I found encouraging. After six days, I was discharged, with a prescription for three more drugs to add to the four I have already been taking!

It has now been over three weeks since I came home, and I am almost back to normal, albeit the progress having been very slow, especially in the first ten days. My hair is starting to grow back, so I am less looking like a monk as each day passes. The sun is getting warmer, the birds are singing, and summer is on the horizon.  All is looking good again.

Now for a haircut!

‘One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you wanted to do. Do them now.’

(Paolo Coelho)

BC (Before COVID), I had a clear vision of how I wanted to spend whatever time I had left – four months in South America, similar in Southern Europe and the rest in South Africa, repeated ad infinitum. That was my ambition. ‘Following the Sun‘ was my mantra and it seemed to be within my grasp.

Until COVID came along and screwed up the world.

Now we are all in life’s waiting room. And governments have seized their opportunity to legislate and control us. But given their inevitable incompetence, they will mostly fail, and we will eventually regain some independence., albeit probably with another useless layer of bureaucracy.

In the meantime, I continue with my efforts to improve my ability in Spanish, French, and Portuguese. In Spanish, I am conversant and relaxed, in French I can defend myself, and in Portuguese I still valiantly struggle, but I hope to eventually sufficiently improve.

My linguistic goal has never been perfection, but to be able to communicate effectively, with a minimum of glaring error. I will always have the intrusion of my Irish accent, and that I am unlikely to lose.

At school, I was never a great student of Latin and French, although I generally achieved acceptable marks. I never understood why we bothered to study languages. I received no encouragement from my parents, who were monolingual. My father always said that he had had enough of Europe after his six years of war service, and he never ever wanted to return. My mother used to say that ‘the only good German was a dead one’, a view that caused many a clash between us. I understood her bitterness, but I also felt that my generation and our children had to turn the page and start a new chapter.

I first travelled around western Europe in 1968, and it was then that I was bitten by languages. I was fascinated by the communication challenges, and when I later realized that ability in Spanish and Portuguese could open new opportunities for me in Central and South America, I was well on my way.

And I have been going for it ever since!

Helen Boyd Reid was born in Glasgow in 1914, of parents John Reid and Martha Hamill.

Helen never knew her father. On 31 July 1918, he was wounded in action, with a gun shot to his right thigh, in the last months of WWI. He was evacuated on the HMAT Warilda, when it was torpedoed by the German submarine, UC-49, between Le Havre and Southampton. The ship sank with 123 of 801 lives lost. John Reid was missing, assumed drowned. I won’t attempt to recount the tragic sinking- you can read about it by clicking on https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/ss-warilda-troopship-hospital-ship-ambulance-transport-wreck

With her father dead, Helen’s mother could not afford to live in Scotland and they moved back to Ireland and lived in a farmhouse between Bushmills and Ballycastle, near her family. In 1933 Helen married Elias Wallace Elliott of nearby Bushmills.

The Elliott family lived in the middle of the three row houses in the following photo. To the left were the Stuart family and to the right was that of Dan Taggart.

To the left of the houses and across the lane into Glenmanus village, were the old Irish cottage and farm buildings of my great-uncle Bill Douglas and his sister, Letitia.  To the right was the saw mill of John Rainey and Dhu Varren dairy.  Opposite was John Rainey’s construction yard.

Mrs Elliott’s youngest son was Malcolm, born soon after I arrived on the scene.

For my first five years, my parents lived in a little wooden hut, less than 1oo m up the road from the Elliotts.  When I was very young, about three, my mother spent six months in a sanitarium in Derry, struck down with tuberculous.  Our neighbour, Mrs Wilson, looked after me, for in those days, my father worked all day on his fledging farm, and every night played with his dance band in Portrush.

I suspect that Mrs Elliott helped out in looking after me, for I can clearly remember being in her house and clambering up the stairs to the landing and being picked up and carried back down.

After my parents build a house and moved his poultry farm to Islandflackey, my contact with Malcolm was limited to the primary school at Carnalridge and youth events at the nearby Ballywillan Church.  I had no relationship with Malcolm’s brothers, for they were much older than we were, but every Sunday morning the whole family used to troop into the church, to their pew in the corner of the western transept.  I always sat with Trevor Gaston and David Adams at the back of the nave.

During our last summer, before moving on to secondary schools, I arranged a blind date for Malcolm, so that I could be with my first love.  We were eleven years old at the time.  We met outside John Rainey’s house, across from the road that leads into Glenmanus village, and we walked up the long lane that led past Caldwell’s farm, holding the girl’s hands.  Unfortunately one of Malcolm’s brothers spotted us, and that was the end of our romantic excursions, albeit not for long.  We were soon back in action.

When I was eighteen, I left for Canada, and apart from seeing Malcolm during one visit to my parents, I lost contact with the Elliott family, although my father used to keep me well informed.  I believe that Tom was an accountant; John was a joiner; Maurice was a mechanic, later to be a blacksmith; Pat was also a mechanic – I bumped into him one evening that I took my father out to dinner; and Malcolm was a painter.  When he was an apprentice, Malcolm painted the sign for my father’s ‘Greenacres Poultry Farm’.

The only other contact I had with Malcolm was at at a reunion of the Ballywillan Boys Brigade; I think it was the 50th reunion, in November 2004. And I heard no more from him until 19 December 2017, when  I was in a bar in Alicante and he sent me an email.  He had come across my blog and we have been in contact ever since.  Sadly his father died in 1982 and his brother, Tom, died in recent years.

Macolm recently sent me the following photographs of his mother, his brothers and his own family. They are photos to be treasured.

When we were teenagers, we used to think that Malcolm looked a bit like Adam Faith. I could not resist including an Adam Faith recording to remind me of those crazy days.

As I sit at my desk in our apartment on the hill above Green Point, I can see over an apartment complex below. Further back is another slightly elevated building, which does nothing to intrude on my overall view.

To the right is the clock tower of Reddam House, a rather exclusive private school, the clock of which recently only told the time accurately twice a day. And slightly further to the right there are three elevated palm trees, whose fluttering of fronds would indicate to me the wind force I could expect on my daily walk through the park and along the coast. When the trunks of the palms thrash and bend, I know that I will have to brace myself.

Below, all day long pass huge tankers, container ships and smaller vessels, pass on their way to and from the Cape Town harbour and around the Cape of Good Hope. If they are early for their berthing, they anchor just off the coast.

The sun sets to the left of the apartment complex, behind the steep slope of Signal Hill.

On a frequent clear day, the sky is a piercing blue. It reminds me very much of the sky that I used to experience in Sydney, so any years ago. It is a blue that one seldom, if ever, witnesses in Northern Europe.

I am usually at my desk in the early evening and I am a frequent witness of the setting of the sun. The line above the blue of the ocean first starts to turn a mellow yellow that gradually become more golden. And it spreads across the sky. When there are light clouds around, the sunset can become quite spectacular.

It is dark now and I draw the curtains on another beautiful African day.