Memorable moments: Parallel tracks

Dad was extraordinarily mechanical—so much so that he carried a quiet, lifelong regret about choosing dentistry over engineering.

Around the house, he was endlessly handy, keeping household appliances humming and personally servicing the engines of his red Beetle and mustard Variant with consummate ease. But his true mechanical genius reached its zenith in his backyard workshop. Amidst the sharp tang of machine oil, turning lathes, and racks of precision drill bits, Dad pursued his greatest passion: engineering miniature, fully functional, coal-fired steam locomotives from scratch.

These weren't flimsy models; they were heavy, magnificent works of industrial art. Engineered to precise scale, a single locomotive took him years of patient milling to complete and possessed enough genuine boiler power to haul seven fully grown adults around a club track.

Naturally, Dad harbored a deep, unspoken hope that his son would inherit the mechanical torch.

Alas, genetics had other ideas. I simply did not inherit that gene. Years later, when I sat for a comprehensive career aptitude test, the results laid it out in cold, indisputable numbers: I scored comfortably above average in nearly every category, except mechanical reasoning—where I landed squarely in the bottom ten percent.

To Dad, who could read an engine diagram like a second language, my total ineptitude with tools occasionally brought him close to despair. He would look on with quiet disappointment as nuts, bolts, and spark plugs failed to ignite even a flicker of curiosity in me.

Thankfully, the mechanical gods sent an apprentice in the form of our close family friend, Julian. Julian was gifted with the exact engineering instinct I lacked. He and Dad bonded effortlessly over calipers, blueprints, and lathe chucks, forging a rich, shared passion. Dad happily mentored him through his projects, and Julian eventually went on to become a professional engineer.

Yet for all my aversion to spanners and gear teeth, I still carried a genuine fascination with the magic of trains, particularly steam locomotives.

I loved climbing aboard the carriages behind Dad’s hand-built engines as they chugged around the club circuit. I cherished the sensory joy of the open-air miniature railway on the Sea Point promenade—riding the little engine along the Atlantic shoreline, the salty breeze in our faces right after a visit to San Marco for ice cream.

The breakthrough moment arrived on an afternoon Dad drove me to a local hobby shop to pick out my very first Lima model train set.

Inside the shop, the gap between engineer and dreamer vanished. We stood before the glass display cases equally starry-eyed, buzzing with the exact same boyish excitement. He admired the scale accuracy and the motor design; I fell in love with the sheer poetry of the rolling stock.

Back home, I cleared space in the storeroom immediately adjacent to Dad's workshop and laid down an expansive electric track.

Over the years that followed, as I steadily built up a magnificent collection of carriages and engines, an easy harmony settled over that corner of the back yard behind the house. Through the adjoining doorway, Dad would spend long, contented hours turning brass and steel for his heavy steam engines, while I spent hours orchestrating schedules and watching my electric Lima train glide across the miniature rails.

I was never going to turn a brass cylinder on a lathe, but in those quiet afternoons beside the hum of the transformer, father and son were finally running on parallel tracks.

Memorable moments: Gentle reassurance

When I was young, I flirted rather heavily with hypochondria. My imagination was prone to running riot, seizing upon the most minor physical anomaly and instantly spinning it into a medical crisis.

The peak of this adolescent anxiety arrived when I was thirteen.

One day, I made what felt like an apocalyptic discovery: several tiny, distinct lumps on my testicles. For weeks, I carried the secret in sheer, silent terror. My frantic brain cycled through every catastrophic scenario imaginable. Was it a rare, disfiguring skin disease? Was it terminal cancer? Each day the dread grew heavier, until the need for certainty finally overpowered the intense embarrassment of being an adolescent boy.

Desperate, I approached my dad and asked if he would take a look.

We stepped out into the yard and walked into his workshop—that familiar backyard sanctuary surrounded by his model trains, metal lathes, and tools. Standing amidst the machinery, I dropped my drawers.

Dad leaned in, took a calm, clinical glance, and looked right back up at me.

"No need to worry, son," he said softly. "Those are just hair follicles."

It was a moment of extraordinary, quiet grace. He could so easily have rolled his eyes, condescended to my ignorance, or made a cheeky joke at my expense. But there was not a trace of mockery in his voice—only steady, matter-of-fact reassurance that dissolved weeks of fear in a single breath.

Standing in the sawdust and grease of his workshop, pulling up my trousers with a profound sense of relief, I felt a deep surge of love for him. In a world full of big anxieties, Dad's gentle, steady way was the safest place to be.

Memorable moments: The anatomy of fragility

There is a tired old playground idiom that tells men to "Stop being  a pussy and grow some balls." As an anatomical metaphor for toughness, it could hardly be more inaccurate. The female anatomy is engineered with enough elasticity and sheer physical resilience to pass a human child the size of a small volleyball into the world. Testicles, by comparison, are ridiculously exposed, unarmored liability zones where the slightest misdirected breeze can reduce a grown adult to a whimpering puddle.

Like almost every man, I have had my fair share of painful education on the subject.

During my school rugby days, a couple of mistimed tackles connected directly where they shouldn't have, producing that hollow, nauseating ache that radiates straight into the solar plexus. Worse still were two distinct occasions in my life when I managed to catch skin in a trouser zipper.

It is a uniquely primal form of terror. The second time it happened, the teeth were so hopelessly snagged that I had to take a pair of scissors and carefully cut the shorts right off my body just to survey the damage. In those desperate, cold-sweat moments of entrapment, the frantic male brain invariably throws up a wild, unhinged question: Should I just yank it?

The answer is always an emphatic, horrified no.

Yet my personal mishaps paled in comparison to what happened to my dad when I was seventeen.

Dad was out in the garden cutting down an overgrown tree. In an effort to get a cleaner cutting angle, he climbed up and braced himself across a high branch. His footing gave way. He slipped off the perch, dropping hard and straddling the branch beneath him with the full momentum of his body weight—compounded by the heavy, steel weight of a petrol chainsaw landing directly between his legs.

It was pure agony. It wasn’t just a momentary shock, either; the trauma was so severe that the injury haunted him for months afterward, requiring strong prescription painkillers just to get through a normal day.

Years later, while chatting with a good friend who had given birth to two children, the subject of bodily suffering came up. Operating on a generous helping of male ignorance, I floated the theory that both sexes possessed their own equivalent pinnacle of agony: women had childbirth, and men had a direct blow to the groin.

She looked at me with withering amusement.

"Hah!" she scoffed. "You try getting kicked in the balls non-stop every two minutes for ten straight hours, Graeme. Then you might have a rough idea of what women actually go through."

I shut my mouth and conceded the point immediately.

Memorable moments: The backstreet pick-up

For most of our youth, Dad was decidedly, magnificently uncool.

His everyday wardrobe consisted of aggressively sensible button-downs paired with high socks pulled taut against knee-length, unfashionable shorts. But his absolute crowning glory of uncoolness was his fleet of cars.

He owned two vehicles: a battered red Volkswagen Beetle and an aging, scuffed VW Type 3 Variant station wagon. Today, vintage Beetles are prized counter-culture icons, but back then, an old red Bug merely functioned as a bright beacon drawing unwanted attention to your total lack of street cred.

The Variant was worse. It was painted a truly dreadful, unappetizing mustard yellow, covered in scratches, and treated entirely as an industrial workhorse. Dad used it primarily to haul his heavy model locomotives and track gear back and forth from his beloved train club. To him, the aesthetics were utterly irrelevant. Being naturally gifted with tools and mechanics, he kept both engines purring in immaculate mechanical order. As long as the pistons fired sweetly, he saw zero reason to waste good money replacing a car just because the exterior looked like it had survived a minor skirmish.

My sister Jo, however, was in the full throes of teenage image preservation. The mustard Variant was her ultimate mortal enemy.

Whenever Dad came to collect us after the final bell, Jo laid down strict tactical protocols: under no circumstances was the yellow monstrosity permitted to breach the school gates. Dad was politely instructed to park two blocks away in a discreet side alley, allowing her to slink out to the car under cover of relative anonymity.

Dad never took offense. He simply took his post in the backstreet, engine ticking over quietly, perfectly amused by her youthful paranoia.

Then came his fiftieth birthday—and with it, an astonishing, wholesale metamorphosis.

It was as if a switch flipped overnight. Dad grew a full, distinguished beard that immediately gave his face immense warmth, gravitas, and character. He ditched the drab conservative palette and started striding around in vibrant, brightly patterned short-sleeve shirts—pioneering the vibrant aesthetic years before Nelson Mandela made the Madiba shirt a global fashion statement.

To complete the transformation, he inherited some money from his own father and promptly traded the dusty air-cooled fleet for a sleek, second-hand BMW.

In one glorious leap, our quiet, sock-pulling dad had become the coolest man in Cape Town.

The irony, of course, was cruel in its timing. Jo would have given anything to lean against that gleaming BMW right outside the main gates as crowds of schoolmates walked past. But by the time Dad finally arrived at peak cool, her school days were behind her.

Memorable moments: The gravel path

During my final year of school, I was right in the thick of my rebellious phase. In my eyes, my dad could simply do no right. I found him far too conservative, too quiet, and exasperatingly mild-mannered. I was convinced that other fathers possessed an effortless dynamism that mine somehow lacked.

Then came a trip to the Kruger National Park that shattered my teenage illusions in an instant.

I was invited along by a school friend and his family to stay at a luxurious private reserve on the outskirts of the park. My friend’s father seemed to embody everything I admired at the time: remarkably wealthy, magnetic, outgoing, and brimming with charismatic energy. Compared to Dad's gentle, unassuming presence at home, this man felt larger than life.

One afternoon, my friend and I set out on foot into the reserve to track some wildlife. Before we left the lodge, his father handed him his expensive camera.

"Be careful with it," he warned, his tone firm.

Half an hour into our walk, our patience paid off: a magnificent eland appeared through the bush. My friend raised the camera to line up a shot, fumbled with the strap, and the camera slipped from his fingers, crashing hard onto the rocky dirt. When he picked it up, there was a visible, undeniable dent in the casing.

The colour instantly drained from his face. A wave of panic took hold of him. He wasn't just disappointed; he was terrified of what would happen when we returned to camp.

"How on earth am I going to explain this so he won't be furious with me?" he muttered, pacing back and forth in sheer distress. "I’ll tell him I took a bad fall. I have to make him believe me."

Then, right before my eyes, he did something that chilled me to the bone.

He dropped to his knees on the gravel track, reached down, and forcefully raked his bare leg across the jagged stones, scraping away layers of skin until a raw, bloody graze opened up across his shin.

Oh my God, I thought, standing there in stunned disbelief.

As I stared at the blood on the gravel, a profound realization hit me with the force of a sledgehammer. If I had dropped my own father’s beloved camera, Dad might have sighed, felt a little disappointed, and maybe reminded me to use the strap next time. But never in a million lifetimes would I have felt the need to mutilate my own flesh just to shield myself from his temper.

In that single, shocking moment on a bush track, the scales fell completely from my eyes. The charisma and swagger I had so admired in other men suddenly looked hollow, while my father’s quiet, mild-mannered gentleness revealed itself for what it truly was: a rare and magnificent gift.

Standing beneath the Kruger sky, nursing another boy’s self-inflicted wound, the foolishness of my rebellion washed away, replaced by an overwhelming, permanent gratitude for the gentle man waiting for me at home. 

Memorable moments: The four-person conveyor belt

There are certain family rituals from childhood that carry a special kind of warmth—simple routines that, in retrospect, anchor an entire upbringing.

In our household, dinner itself was rarely a grand conversational affair. We were very much a family that ate from trays balanced on our laps in front of the television, eyes glued to the screen while silence reigned. The real connection, as it turned out, was scheduled for immediately afterward.

Once the credits rolled, the entire family decamped to the kitchen for a communal washing-up session. It was in that small, steamy space that the day was actually unpacked and the real conversations began.

We ran a remarkably intricate, four-person assembly line.

Mum took the helm at the sink, washing each item down in a sink of hot, sudsy water. I stood beside her armed with a tea towel, drying each dripping plate as it emerged from the bubbles. Once dry, I would pass the plate to Dad. Dad would then turn slightly and hand the plate to Jo. And Jo would finally place it onto the shelf in the cupboard.

Dad, quite clearly, had negotiated the easiest job on the planet—a human relay baton whose sole duty was transferring ceramic goods across an eighteen-inch gap of linoleum. But nobody ever resented it. It was never about industrial efficiency; it was about the easy, rhythmic rhythm of all four of us working side-by-side in harmony.

That childhood assembly line left an indelible mark on me. To this day, I have an enduring, genuine love for washing dishes.

Whenever I’m on a weekend getaway with a group of friends, I am always the first to volunteer for sink duty. I love the simple, tactile satisfaction of it—the warmth of the water, the clean scent of the soap, and the quiet joy of watching grease and chaos turn into sparkling order. But more than anything, I love the kitchen companionship: the unhurried, companionable banter between the washer, the drier, and the designated putter-awayer.

Memorable moments: The black and white years

In my mid-teens, I went through that familiar, prickly rite of passage: an intense, reflexive rebellion against authority. Whether it was the rigid rules of school or the quiet boundaries set at home, I bristled against all of it.

I directed most of that restless friction toward my dad—something I carry a genuine pang of regret about now. To my teenage eyes, he seemed overly conservative, too measured, too bound by conventional lanes. Naturally, I took it upon myself to act as his permanent ideological opposition. If Dad said something was white, I felt a deep, instinctive duty to argue that it was unequivocally black.

The absurdity of that contrarian streak reached its absolute pinnacle one evening as I was heading out the front door to a party.

Dad looked up, completely pleasant and entirely without agenda, and said, "Bye Graeme, have a good time."

I scowled, gripped the doorknob, and snapped back: "Dad, don't tell me what to do!"

Looking back across the years, Dad was remarkably wise in ways I was far too self-absorbed to appreciate at fifteen. He was gentle and patient, mostly enduring my prickly defiance with the quiet composure he brought to everything else. What stings with hindsight is knowing how brief the runway really was; he would only be with us for another ten or so years. I only wish I’d had the maturity then to cut him some slack, drop the argument, and appreciate him for who he was.

Memorable moments: Mid-tackle realization

When I was in my early teens, I played a lot of rugby at school. Every Saturday meant a high-stakes match against a rival school, and to protect my teeth from the inevitable collisions, I always wore a fitted plastic mouthguard.

One afternoon earlier that week, I walked into the lounge at home and caught our family dog, Tina, enthusiastically chewing on something in her paws. I rushed over and pried it out of her jaws: it was my rugby mouthguard, dripping with warm, soggy dog saliva. Since I was in a massive hurry to head out, I set it down on the table and made a firm mental note to give it a thorough, heavy-duty scrub with strong soap later on.

Fast forward to Saturday morning. I was out on the field in the middle of a fiercely contested match against another school. The crowd was roaring, parents were cheering frantically from the sidelines, and the energy was intense.

I locked eyes on an opposing player charging toward me with the ball, dropped my shoulders, and braced myself to make a massive tackle.

Then, at the exact split-second before impact, my brain suddenly flashed back to the table at home.

Oh no. I forgot to clean my mouthguard.

It was sitting firmly in my mouth, right where it always was for a game. A sudden wave of utter horror washed over me, and it took every single ounce of my willpower not to spit the soggy piece of plastic straight onto the grass in front of everyone. But with an opponent flying at me and parents screaming from the sidelines, there was no time for sanitation protocols—it was far too late now.

Memorable moments: The orthodontic awakening

When I was thirteen, I went through the standard teenage rite of passage: getting orthodontic braces. Periodically, I had to visit the clinic to have them tightened. For most teenagers, this is a dreaded chore, notorious for causing days of dull ache and intense discomfort.

Naturally, my parents were utterly baffled by my reaction to these appointments. Instead of dreading them, I always got incredibly excited. I counted down the days, practically leaping into the car when it was time to go. They probably thought they had raised the most resilient, stoic teenager in South Africa.

They wouldn't have been surprised if they had known the truth.

My mum would drop me off outside the clinic, and I would head upstairs with an uncharacteristic spring in my step. The magic began the moment the orthodontic nurse came to fetch me from the waiting room. She was a gorgeous, friendly blonde who always made a point of asking me how school was going, treating me with a warmth that completely disarmed my thirteen-year-old self.

The highlight, however, was the actual procedure. I would lie back in the chair, and she would lean closely over me with her tightening tool to adjust the wires, her ample bosom just inches from my dazzled gaze. For a teenager right at the precipice of waking up to the world of romance and attraction, having this lovely woman so close  was absolute heaven.

To her, it was just a routine, innocent Tuesday morning at the office. To me, it was a profound, thrilling introduction to the opposite sex. The physical discomfort of the tightening didn't matter at all; the scenery more than made up for it. It remains one of my funniest memories of growing up—a time when a painful dental adjustment somehow became the most anticipated event on my social calendar.

Memorable moments: The epic spray

I have always struggled with seasickness. Over the years, two specific voyages have etched themselves into my memory—not for the scenery, but for the sheer, green-tinged misery of the experience.

The first was on my eighteenth birthday in Mauritius. To celebrate the milestone, our family chartered a yacht for a cruise. It was a choppy, restless day, and as the boat pitched, my stomach began its own rhythmic descent into darkness. I reached a point of such profound nausea that I actually had fantasies of diving overboard just to end the motion. I desperately wanted to be sick, hoping for that legendary moment of relief, but my body refused to cooperate.

I was sitting doubled over, staring at the deck in a state of absolute "suffer-fest," when a well-meaning hand thrust a large plate directly under my nose. It was piled high with pungent tuna sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs. That was the breaking point. The smell was the final sensory assault I couldn't survive. I scrambled for the back of the ship and delivered an epic, birthday-defining spray into the Indian Ocean.

Ten years later, I found myself on a ferry from Israel to Egypt. The Mediterranean was in a foul mood, and the ship was tossing violently. This time, I wasn't alone in my suffering; the entire deck was a gallery of green faces. I retreated to the stern to reenact my eighteenth birthday, joining a line of fellow passengers who were all projectile vomiting over the railing.

What sticks in my mind most vividly, however, isn't the sickness—it’s the gulls. An entire flock of them hovered in our wake, shrieking with delight. They weren't just following us; they were diving into the sea to feast on our collective misery. It was a sobering reminder of the natural order: while we were experiencing the lowest point of our human existence, the seagulls were having the best lunch of their lives.

Memorable moments: The sooty shins

When I was seven years old, I underwent surgery on both of my Achilles tendons. The recovery required me to have both legs encased in plaster of Paris from my toes to my knees for six long weeks.

At the start, I loved it. My legs became a living canvas as friends and family covered the white plaster in doodles and signatures. I can still understand the appeal of tattoos based on that early experience of wearing my social circle on my shins.

However, the novelty eventually wore off, replaced by a relentless, agonizing itch deep inside the casts. In our family home in Medway, we had a beautiful fireplace complete with a set of copper tools. Desperate for relief, I discovered that the long, slender fire poker was the perfect tool for the job. I would slide the cold metal down the top of the cast to reach those impossible spots. It was heaven, providing the only real relief I could find.

Finally, the day arrived to have the casts removed. The doctor brought out a specialized cutter and began the process of vibrantly buzzing through the layers of plaster. As the shells fell away, he suddenly recoiled in genuine horror.

My shins were stained a deep, mottled black.

For a terrifying second, the doctor was convinced he was looking at a catastrophic, gangrenous infection that had claimed both of my legs under his watch. His relief was palpable—and perhaps a little exasperated—when I explained that I’d simply been scratching myself with the soot-covered fire poker for the last month.

Memorable moments: The Matric marathon

In South Africa, the Matric Dance is the undisputed peak of the school social calendar. It’s a night of high-stakes glamour, tuxedos, and floor-length gowns. I went with a childhood friend, Wendy, but my close friend Tony was in a bit of a bind. Tony was the academic titan of our year—frighteningly intelligent and always top of the class—but he was a bit of a nerd and lacked the social "processing power" to find a date.

Feeling for him, I offered up my sister, Jo. She was gorgeous, lovely, and possessed a non-judgmental patience that I knew would be the perfect safety net for Tony.

The night began perfectly. We all looked the part in our formal gear, the atmosphere was electric, and the girls looked spectacular. Then, the music started, and the "disaster" began to unfold on the dance floor.

Tony, whom I had never seen move faster than a brisk walk toward a library, didn’t so much find the rhythm as he did a pace. Being tall and gangly, he didn't sway or step. He jogged. He began to lunge up and down on the spot with giant, athletic strides—arms pumping and legs churning with the mechanical efficiency of a cross-country runner.

Poor Jo was dutifully in tow, trying to maintain some semblance of a dance while Tony treated the disco lights like a finish line. After about an hour of this high-intensity cardio, Jo and I managed a quick sidebar. She was breathless but smiling, her legendary patience still intact.

"My God," she whispered, "he must have clocked up at least ten kilometers by now!"

It was a classic "Tony" moment. He had approached the dance floor with the same relentless focus he applied to his exams, oblivious to the fact that he was the only person in the room treating a slow ballad like a qualifying heat for the Olympics.

Family stories: The institution of lumpy custard

Our family used to go round for dinner at Gran and Gramps on a regular basis. It remains one of my favorite memories. Gran was an absolutely awesome cook, a woman who could navigate a kitchen with effortless grace, consistently producing amazing meals that anchored our family life.

But there was one singular, recurring flaw in her culinary repertoire: the custard.

For some reason, the smooth, silken sauce of the professional chef always eluded her. Her custard was invariably lumpy—filled with those strange, sweet islands of undissolved powder that defied every stir of her wooden spoon. It was the one thing she didn't make perfectly.

We turned it into a family institution. We’d sit around the table and make fun of it in the kindest way possible, poking at the "treasures" hidden in our dessert bowls. Gran would just smile, unfazed by the teasing.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that while we admired her for her "perfect" roasts, we truly loved her for that custard. It was a reminder that excellence is impressive, but it’s people’s imperfections that we actually bond over. Those lumps weren't a failure of cooking; they were the texture of home.

Memorable moments: Raspy tongues and greasy pots

When I was sixteen, I went on a school trip to the Okavango Delta in Botswana. It was a sensory-overloaded, extraordinary experience—gliding through secret waterways in a dugout canoe and watching the wildlife drift past.

However, the reality of camping on an island in the Delta involved a fair amount of "suffer-fest" labor. We were a participatory group, which meant everyone shared the chores. The worst of these was the washing up. With no detergent and no hot water, trying to scrub the grease off metal pots and plates was an exercise in futility and frustration. One of my classmates, Peter, took a particular dislike to the task, spending most of the first night complaining bitterly about the state of our cookware.

On the second night, exhausted and defeated by the grime, we were given permission to leave the dirty pots and plates until the morning light.

In the middle of the night, the atmosphere shifted. A clan of hyenas arrived, circling our tents with their eerie, guttural chortling. I remember the smell—it was thick, wild, and incredibly pungent. Lying in my sleeping bag, listening to them sniff around just inches from the canvas, was terrifying. Eventually, the sounds faded, and the "smelly" visitors disappeared into the bush.

The next morning, we braced ourselves for the greasy cleanup. Instead, we found that our cookware had undergone a professional-grade restoration. Every single pot and plate had been scoured to a mirror finish. The hyenas had spent the night using their incredibly raspy tongues—which would have put any metal scourer to shame—to lick every molecule of fat from the metal.

While the rest of us were still shaking off the fear of the night's visitors, Peter was absolutely ecstatic.

"We’ve solved it!" he shouted, holding up a sparkling pot. "We can do this again tonight! No more need to clean the plates!"

Memorable moments: The vulture and the rookie

During my final years of school, I developed a consuming passion for bird watching. It was ignited by my close friend Tony Verboom, an expert birder who introduced me to the gritty reality of the craft. We spent our mornings at Rietvlei, crawling on our bellies through knee-deep mud, getting thoroughly filthy in pursuit of "lesser-spotted thing-a-me-bobs." I loved every second of it—especially the moment a magnificent Osprey banked over our heads, sealing my fate as a "twitcher."

From then on, I lived and breathed birds, cycling to local wetlands every weekend to increase my "life list."

Shortly after I started, while I was still very much a novice, Tony and I spotted a large bird drifting in the distant Cape sky. Tony gasped in genuine shock. "My God, it’s a Cape Vulture!" He was ecstatic; Cape Vultures hadn't been recorded in the Peninsula for sixty years. Tony was so convinced that he wrote a formal report for the Cape Bird Club newsletter.

When the article was published, I saw my name in print for the first time: Verified by Tony Verboom and fellow spotter, Graeme Myburgh. I felt a wave of hot embarrassment. I was a beginner; I just hoped the veteran birders wouldn't realize that my "verification" carried about as much weight as a sparrow’s feather. I lived in fear of blowing Tony’s credibility.

The moment of truth came during a Bird Club weekend trip to Swellendam. Tony couldn't make it, so I carpooled with the Chairman of the club, a friendly, high-level expert named Jan. As we drove, Jan mentioned the newsletter. "Extraordinary sighting, that vulture," he said. I nodded, trying to look like a man who knew his raptors.

I was obsessed with seeing a Black Harrier on that trip. I had them on the brain. Suddenly, I saw a large, black-and-white shape perched on a power line.

"Oh my God, stop!" I cried. "Black Harrier!"

Jan slammed on the brakes. The car screeched to a halt, dust billowing around us. He leaned out, binoculars raised, squinting at the bird. He looked confused, then slowly turned to me.

"Graeme," he said gently, "that’s a Pied Crow."

It was one of the most common birds in the Western Cape. Even a rank amateur knows a crow from a harrier, but my wishful thinking had performed a mid-air transformation. I sat there in the settling dust, mortified. I was certain I had just blown the credibility of Tony’s legendary vulture sighting to smithereens in a single, caffeinated outburst.

Thankfully, Jan was a man of immense patience and quiet grace. He didn't mock me or question the vulture article; he simply shifted back into gear and drove on. We had a marvelous weekend of birding, and while the Black Harrier never made an appearance, I learned a vital lesson: in the bush, as in life, you have to see what’s actually there, not just what you’re desperate to find.

Memorable moments: The Paarl Gymnasium massacre

Growing up, my mother was the silent, steady heartbeat of my rugby career. I have the most heart-warming memories of her standing in the pouring rain, huddled under an umbrella, cheering us on through every muddy scrum and sodden tackle. Her love was as consistent as the Cape winter weather.

But there was one fixture on the annual calendar for which her nervous system was simply not equipped: the away match against Paarl Gymnasium.

Paarl Gym was an Afrikaans powerhouse out in the country, and to our prep school eyes, they didn't look like children—they looked like a different species. They towered over us, their forearms the size of our thighs. We were convinced they’d been raised on a strict diet of boerewors and biltong instead of breast milk. For them, winning wasn't just a goal; it was existential.

I have a vivid, slightly traumatic memory of three of us desperately clinging to a single Paarl player, hitching a collective piggyback ride as he thundered toward the try line, completely indifferent to the extra weight of three terrified schoolboys.

And then there were the fathers.

The Paarl dads didn't just spectate; they participated. Many of them wore the exact same rugby kit as their sons, looking like older, angrier versions of the giants on the field. During one particularly lopsided encounter, I saw a father reach down, rip a side flag out of the turf, and begin stabbing the ground with it in a rhythmic frenzy.

"Moer hulle, seuns!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. "Murder them, boys!"

Needless to say, the score was always catastrophically one-sided. I don’t think we ever managed to cross their try line, let alone win a match. I never blamed my mum for sitting those ones out. While she was happy to watch us get wet in the rain, she drew the line at watching us get systematically dismantled by teenage titans while their fathers reenacted medieval battle cries on the touchline.

Memorable moments: Thick as Tina

Growing up, we had a beloved dog named Tina. I have never, in all my years, seen a dog who could wag her tail with such violent, sustained joy. It didn't matter if you’d been gone for two years or two minutes; Tina’s tail was her primary mode of communication.

Eventually, her enthusiasm became her undoing. She wagged so hard and so often against the walls that her tail was constantly injured, the scabs breaking open and spraying blood everywhere in a rhythmic, joyful massacre. It lasted for months until it became untenable. With heavy hearts, my parents had the vet remove it.

Tina returned home wearing a pair of female panties for a few weeks to protect the healing stump. But the loss of the tail didn't dampen her spirit; it just forced her to find a new medium for her delight. From that day on, when she saw you, she would emit a low, rumbling hum of pleasure through her nose while her entire hindquarters swung from side to side in a rhythmic "butt-wag." If the excitement reached a certain threshold, she’d punctuate the moment by widdling with pure joy.

Tina lived for the driveway ball-toss. We had another dog, Meg, and the competition between them was nothing short of existential. For Tina, getting to the ball before Meg wasn't just a game—it was her life’s work. If Meg won, the heartbreak was visible.

When she wasn't competing for tennis balls, Tina was hunting shadows. She was particularly obsessed with the moving silhouettes of butterflies, chasing them across the grass for hours, barking at the ground, and occasionally stubbing her nose on the dirt in her pursuit of a dark spot. At night, she’d transfer that intensity to torchlight, sprinting after a beam of light as if it were a tangible prize.

My grandfather, never one to mince words, used to use her as the family benchmark for intelligence. If my sister or I did or said something particularly dim-witted, he’d shake his head and say, "Don’t be as thick as Tina."

He wasn't entirely wrong about her IQ, but I loved her with all my heart. She was the kinetic, shadow-chasing soundtrack to my childhood and teens—a dog who might not have understood how light worked, but who understood exactly how to love a family with every fiber of her (short-tailed) being.

Memorable moments: The empty envelope

When I was in prep school, I went to spend Christmas with my friend Greg Perks and his family at his grandparents' house in Plettenberg Bay. It was a classic, sun-drenched coastal Christmas, and we all gathered in the living room for the sacred ritual of opening presents and cards.

The atmosphere was festive until Greg opened the card from his Gran.

He pulled it out, read the message, and his face immediately fell into a mask of pure confusion and mild disappointment. He looked at the empty envelope, then back at the card, and then at his mother, Barbara.

Barbara, meanwhile, was having an identical experience. She stared at her own card with a furrowed brow, looking increasingly concerned.

The message inside every single card, written in Gran’s elegant hand, was the same: "Buy yourself a present this year."

After the gift-opening ended, Barbara pulled Gran aside for a "little word," her voice laced with genuine worry.

"Mum," she whispered, "is everything okay? What did you mean by what you wrote in the cards? Are you... financially strapped? Do we need to help?"

Gran looked at her with total bewilderment. "Financially strapped? Heavens, no! Why on earth would you think that?"

"Well," Barbara replied, "you told everyone to buy themselves a present."

Gran’s eyes went wide as the realization hit her. "Oh my goodness!" she cried. "I’ve just been so busy! I sat down and wrote out cheques for every single one of you, and I fully intended to include them. But I’ve just realized... I forgot to actually put the cheques in the cards!"

Sure enough, a quick trip to her cupboard revealed the missing small fortune, neatly signed and waiting for a home.

Memorable moments: The blackboard brawl

In 1984, my school world shifted. We moved away from the dour, strict atmosphere of the previous headmaster and into the era of Mr. Cannon. He was charismatic, warm, and—most importantly—an unbelievable teacher. In his first year, he tossed out the standard textbook and devoted half the syllabus to an "alternative" approach. We were no longer students; we were detectives, gleaning history from archaeological clues and conflicting accounts.

But the most powerful lesson I ever received didn't come from a book or a shard of pottery. It came from a staged "scandal" that has stayed with me for nearly forty years.

We were in the middle of a session when the Deputy Head, Mr. Hart, stormed into the classroom. He looked livid. He marched up to Mr. Cannon and bellowed, "I saw you eyeing up my wife the other day! How dare you!" (To this day, I’m not even sure Mr. Hart was married, but the delivery was flawless).

The class sat in stunned, horizontal silence as the two most powerful men in our school got into a physical scuffle. Mr. Hart shoved Mr. Cannon against the blackboard, teeth bared, shouting more angry words while we watched in total disbelief.

"You haven't heard the end of this!" Mr. Hart finally screamed, storming out and slamming the door.

The tension in the room was thick enough to carve. We were reeling—what had we just witnessed? Mr. Cannon calmly straightened his tie, dusted off his jacket, and turned to us with a slow, knowing smile.

"Right class," he said quietly. "What did just happen here?"

The relief that swept through the room as we realized it was a performance was immense, but the real work was just beginning. Mr. Cannon began to grill us on the details. What was Mr. Hart wearing? What exactly did he say? What did his body language insinuate?

The results were staggering. Even though we had all been in the same small room, watching the same event only ten minutes prior, our accounts were a mess of contradictions. We argued over the words used, the intensity of the shove, and even the color of Mr. Hart's tie.

Mr. Cannon grinned with the satisfaction of a man who had just pulled off the ultimate heist.

"Well, class," he said, "if you can't all agree on something you witnessed first-hand ten minutes ago, how in the hell can you believe in historical accounts? How can you believe in history?"

Nearly forty years later, the details of that day are still more vivid to me than any date I ever memorized for an exam. That is the definition of powerful teaching: creating an experience so disorienting that the truth finally has a chance to sink in.

Memorable moments: The ribbon transformation

When I was in high school, our mathematical world was presided over by Mr. Norton. To our teenage eyes, he seemed ancient—at least eighty years old—and his teaching style was as dry as the chalk dust he conjured. We were a naturally unruly bunch, and Mr. Norton’s dullness was the perfect fuel for our misbehavior. We pushed every boundary, right up until the day reality crashed into the classroom: Mr. Norton had a sudden heart attack.

The guilt was immediate and heavy. We felt personally responsible for his failing heart, and his long absence left a somber void. That void, however, was soon filled by a replacement who couldn't have been further from Mr. Norton’s world.

She was an eighteen-year-old Polish girl, straight out of university, named Miss Kateryna. She was young, pretty, and possessed a simple, daily ritual that became the focal point of our lives: she wore a different colored ribbon in her hair every single day.

The effect on our class was miraculous.

Before she even stepped through the door, the once-rowdy room would be hushed in anticipation as we placed frantic bets on the day's color. "Yellow?" "Deep blue?" "Red?" The entire class was hopelessly, collectively smitten.

We had spent years perfecting the art of being a nuisance, but in her presence, we became like meek puppies. The transition was total. You could hear a pin drop in that room; we hung on her every word, suddenly finds ourselves intensely interested in the properties of a parabola or the mysteries of calculus.

It turns out that what Mr. Norton’s decades of experience couldn't achieve, a bit of Ukrainian charm and a silk ribbon did in an afternoon. We were a group of teenagers who had successfully defeated an "ancient" authority figure, only to be completely conquered by an eighteen-year-old with a penchant for primary colors.