Memorable moments: Her beautiful face

Mum and Dad were never grandly demonstrative or effusive with their affection.

Dad was naturally introverted and emotionally reserved—though nowhere near as withheld as his own father, who took emotional distance to stoic extremes. Even so, I think Mum often wished Dad had been a little more openly romantic. She was usually the one to initiate a warm embrace. Dad would return the hug, but always with a faint undercurrent of discomfort around public displays of affection. Almost as an instinctive, conditioned defense mechanism to diffuse the intimacy, he would give her bottom an affectionate little pat, look down, and call her "Diddums"—his pet name for her. 

Yet beneath that quiet, self-conscious exterior, the love between them ran deep. You just had to watch closely for the moments when the guard came down.

Two distinct memories made that crystal clear to me.

The first was during a family holiday to Mauritius. We had spent an idyllic week soaking up the island sun, completely unwinding by the Indian Ocean. Free from the routines of the dental practice and the workshop, Dad was more relaxed than I had ever seen him.

On the transfer bus heading back to the airport, Mum and Dad sat together just ahead of us. As the lush landscape drifted past the windows, I glanced over and noticed they were holding hands—fingers laced together, quiet and still. It was something I had literally never seen them do before. There was such an unforced, luminous tenderness between the two of them in that moment that it moved me to tears right there on the bus. It etched itself into my mind as an enduring portrait of what they really shared.

The second moment emerged from a completely different, far more frightening setting.

Dad and I had embarked on a four-day canoe expedition down the Orange River. It was a magnificent adventure, navigating the wide desert gorges under the sun, and Dad was having the time of his life—until we hit the biggest rapid on the route.

Our canoe took on water, lost its line, and capsized violently into the boiling white water.

We both managed to swim through the currents and scramble ashore to safety, but the shock of the submersion completely shattered Dad’s nervous system. It psyched him out in a way I had never witnessed before. The trauma triggered an intense, lingering panic attack that hung over him for days like a dark cloud, so severe that he became convinced the shock had brought on a mild stroke.

Over the days that followed, as we paddled through the calmer waters, he kept turning to me with genuine distress in his eyes, repeating the same haunting thought:

"Graeme, I really think I've had a stroke... I can't picture your mum's face. I can't picture her beautiful face."

Eventually, as the days wore on and his nervous system slowly recalibrated, the panic receded and his mind cleared. But the phrase stayed with me.

In the midst of the most terrifying physical and psychological crisis of his life, when his brain felt hijacked by shock, his immediate, instinctive terror wasn't about his health, his safety, or his survival. His world narrowed entirely to the fear of losing the memory of the woman he loved.

Dad may not have been a man for flowery poetry or grand public romance, but when the waters ran rough, she was the anchor his soul reached for first.

Memorable moments: Mustard, screwdrivers, and wet dreams

Dad was never the flamboyant, life-of-the-party type. Left entirely to his own devices, he wanted nothing more than to retreat into the quiet solitude of his workshop, spending uninterrupted hours milling brass and steel for his beloved steam locomotives.

In large social gatherings, his natural shyness took over. Even at the legendary braais hosted by his friend Stan—who lived right on the beach in Melkbosstrand and had an actual miniature train track winding through his garden—Dad was often the quiet, observant figure lingering gently on the periphery rather than commanding the room.

Yet introversion was only half the picture. With a select circle of close companions, he completely blossomed.

Around people like Derek, his dental partner John Sawkins, and especially Jimmy—a lovely, elderly friend who lived just down our road by the local park—Dad was warm, utterly relaxed, and full of effortless camaraderie. In those intimate settings, there was endless laughter.

You see, Dad’s quiet reserve was paired with a wicked, playful sense of fun that leaned unapologetically toward the cheeky, naughty side. Whenever he launched into a joke or an irreverent anecdote, those striking green eyes would dance and sparkle. More often than not, he’d find his own punchlines so genuinely hilarious that his laughter would dissolve into an affectionate, wheezing coughing fit before he could even finish the sentence.

That mischievous streak was on full display every Christmas morning.

Dad delighted in wrapping practical items in cheeky double entendres. One year, he handed me a carefully wrapped package with a tag that read: "To help with your screwing technique." Inside was a brand-new set of screwdrivers. Another year, he presented Gramps with a parcel marked: "For a man who likes a bit on the side"—which was, of course, a jar of English mustard.

His cheeky imagination peaked when I was invited to a 21st birthday party by a ballroom dancing friend named Sally.

The invitation called for fancy dress with the theme "Dream Time: dress as your favorite dream or your worst nightmare." It was ripe for creative interpretation. When I mentioned the dilemma at home, Dad didn't miss a beat.

"Put on a pair of pyjamas, jump fully clothed into the shower, and go as a wet dream!" he offered with a grin.

As brilliant as the concept was, a soaking-wet pair of flannel pyjamas on a freezing Cape Town winter night felt like a swift route to hypothermia. Sally and I opted for the warmer, safer route, heading into town to a costume hire shop instead.

Dad’s irreverent wit remains one of the qualities I cherish most about my memories of him. Behind the quiet exterior, the conservative shirts, and the steady dentist's hands was a man who saw the absurd, playful side of human nature and refused to take life too seriously. It was a wonderful legacy to grow up around—and the very spark from which I inherited my own lifelong love of humor and mischief.

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: Dad’s petrol rebellions

My dad was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a reckless rule-breaker. In almost every arena of life, he was a steady, methodical man who respected boundaries, followed instructions, and kept well within the lines.

Except when it came to petrol.

The moment volatile hydrocarbons were involved, a rogue, undercover operative emerged from inside the mild-mannered dentist.

Every year, our family embarked on an annual holiday to Eight Bells, a lovely guest farm nestled in the mountains near Mossel Bay. The ritual always began in the pitch black of five in the morning, loading into the car while the rest of the neighborhood was fast asleep.

About halfway into the six-hour journey, with the fuel gauge hovering uncomfortably near empty, Dad would execute a maneuver worthy of a Cold War thriller. At the exact same undisclosed spot along the route every year, he would peel off the highway and pull deep into a concealed clearing out of sight of passing traffic.

While Mum unpacked breakfast—a Tupperware tub of cold sausages and pungent hard-boiled eggs whose sulfurous aroma I dreaded—Dad got down to business.

He would cast a furtive, conspiratorial glance across the empty veld to ensure no police patrols were lurking, pop the boot, and hoist out a heavy jerry can of illicit fuel. Under South Africa’s strict oil embargo and rationing laws of the era, hoarding and transporting private reserves of fuel like this was entirely illegal. Dad would place a funnel into the neck of the fuel tank and pour the bootleg petrol directly into the car, his eyes darting toward the tarmac like an international smuggler topping up between borders.

The dangerous streak didn't end on the highway; it was an essential fixture of our weekend family braais.

Dad cooked over a colossal half-barrel he had personally sliced and welded from a full steel drum in his workshop. His fire-building was a masterclass in structural engineering: he laid out thick logs in an immaculate, hollow rectangle, meticulously crisscrossing the timber to create an architectural chimney.

Any ordinary backyard cook might reach for dry twigs, pine cones, or scrunched-up newspaper to coax the fire to life. Not Dad.

He would stride over with his beloved container of petrol and generously douse the entire timber structure in fuel until the logs were thoroughly soaked. Next came the choreography: he would take precisely two measured paces backward, strike a match, and flick it into the hollow core.

WOOSH!

It was less an ignition than a localized sonic boom. The air would displace with a tremendous roar of heat and light, instantly engulfing the drum in a towering inferno of orange flame. The logs were roaring within a split-second.

Standing before the blast, his eyebrows intact and the heat reflecting in his green eyes, Dad would wear an expression of supreme, quiet satisfaction. It was as though the secret stuntman buried deep within his soul had been granted his ritual fix, leaving him thoroughly appeased and ready to return to his peaceful, risk-averse life until the next tank needed filling.

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: Decidedly uncool

When it comes to alcohol, I have always been decidedly uncool.

I grew up in South Africa, where beer isn't just a beverage; it is a sacred cultural institution. It is considered the ultimate man's drink, and sharing your first cold beer with your father as you cross the threshold into young adulthood is practically a mandatory rite of passage.

When my turn came, my dad was genuinely thrilled to initiate his son into the fold and share his love of a good brew.

From the very first sip, however, the experiment was a disaster. I hated it. It was far too bitter, entirely devoid of sweetness, and had no appeal to my palate whatsoever. The only conceivable way I could stomach it was by diluting it heavily with lemonade to turn it into a weak shandy—and even then, I would have dropped it in a heartbeat for a sweet apple cider. My poor dad must have looked at me and wondered what went wrong: his son had arrived at manhood with the drinking preferences of a child in a sweet shop.

A few years later, as a student at the University of Cape Town, I decided to join the university wine club. In truth, my motivations had very little to do with viticulture and everything to do with the strategic opportunity to mingle with tipsy girls.

The wine club, I quickly discovered, operated on a rigid, unspoken caste system of sophistication:

• The Aristocracy: Bold, tannic red wine reigned supreme at the top.
• The Upper Middle Class: Crisp, bone-dry whites occupied the respectable middle tier.
• The Social Pariahs: Sweet white wines languished near the gutter.
• The Sub-Basement: Sticky dessert wines sat at the absolute bottom, viewed as a crime against enology.

Given my relentless sweet tooth, there were no prizes for guessing where my tastes landed. I found red wine far too sour and acidic, and dry white wine was, well, entirely too dry. While the serious connoisseurs swirled their glasses and pontificated on hints of oak and leather, I was happily lingering down in the subterranean dessert-wine section, thoroughly unbothered.

As the years rolled on, I drifted away from alcohol altogether. I simply stopped enjoying the taste, and more than anything, it just made me feel sluggish and tired. So, I packed it in completely.

These days, when I finish a long trail and join my hiking mates at the pub, I don’t order a crisp craft ale or a stout. I walk straight up to the bar and ask for a soda, lime, and bitters.

Naturally, this is considered the height of social heresy. My friends love their beer, and ordering a sparkling cordial in an Australian pub is hardly the blueprint for rugged coolness. In the beginning, there was the inevitable good-natured ribbing, but over time, they’ve come to accept that Graeme simply drinks pink fizzy water.

And really, who cares? One of the greatest dividends of growing older is that you finally become completely comfortable in your own skin. The exhausting urge to posture, to perform masculinity with a pint glass, or to drink something you loathe just to blend into the herd simply evaporates. There is immense freedom in standing at the bar, decidedly uncool, knowing exactly what you like and letting the rest of the world get on with their bitter beer. 

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: Dad's bed bug fiction

Dad and I shared a deep love for the open road. In my late teens, we set off on some unforgettable road trips together—meandering along the Garden Route to Knysna, winding through the sheer rock gorges of the Swartberg Pass, and journeying north into the game reserves of Zululand.

Those long drives were a golden chapter for father-and-son bonding, set to an eccentric soundtrack. We blasted the Hooked on Classics orchestral disco hits on repeat, followed by rousing renditions of Pomp and Circumstance. Dad had his heavy video camera primed on the dashboard to record the scenery, while I was glued to the window with my binoculars, thoroughly obsessed with my new passion for birding.

Yet for all that warmth, I held onto one affectionate grievance from those travels.

During an overnight stay in Knysna, I pulled back my bed covers and discovered a massive, dead insect lying flat on the sheet. Growing up in Cape Town, where cockroaches weren't an everyday household fixture, I didn't recognize it.

"Dad, what on earth is this?" I asked, pointing at the carcass.

Dad leaned over, inspected the beast, and looked at me with an unmistakable glint in his eye.

"Oh, that’s a bed bug," he said casually. "Don't worry, that one's dead. But you'd better watch out—they usually travel in packs."

I was utterly horrified. I had heard dark tales of blood-sucking parasites, and the terrifying prospect of a pack of these armored, palm-sized mini-monsters lurking in the folds of my duvet waiting to drain my veins kept me awake with my eyes bolted to the ceiling. It wasn't until much later that I learned what a cockroach actually was and realized I’d been royally wound up.

Decades later, I emigrated to Sydney. I quickly discovered that Australian cockroaches were a completely different breed: monstrously large, terrifyingly fast, and endowed with the deeply unsettling ability to fly straight at your head.

But Sydney also had the real thing waiting for me.

Ally and I had rented a lovely flat overlooking the water, with the white sails of the Sydney Opera House visible in the distance. Ally’s sister, Kerry, had stayed with us for several months, occupying our spare room before eventually moving out.

Shortly afterward, my mum and Mike flew in from South Africa for a visit. To accommodate everyone, we handed them our double bed, Ally camped out on a mattress, and I volunteered to take Kerry’s old single bed in the spare room.

The next morning, I woke up in absolute agony, covered from head to toe in furious, itchy red welts.

Mum took one look at my speckled skin and gasped: "Oh no... that looks like bed bugs."

We hauled the mattress up and flipped it over. The underside was an absolute horror show—a writhing colony of bed bugs, completely blackened by thousands of tiny parasites and their accumulated waste. While Dad had joked about a solitary giant in Knysna, here was the literal definition of a pack feasting on me uninterrupted all night long.

The most disturbing revelation was that the infestation hadn't appeared overnight. They had clearly been biting Kerry for months on end, but because her skin simply never developed an allergic reaction to the saliva, she had lived alongside the horde in blissful ignorance.

It took three separate visits from a heavy-duty exterminator with industrial chemicals to finally eradicate them.

Scrubbing the bite marks in the shower, I found myself thinking back to that hotel room in the Western Cape. In hindsight, I almost wished Dad’s Knysna bedtime story had been true—because fighting off a visible, heavy-footed cockroach would have been far easier than waging chemical warfare against an invisible army.

Memorable moments: A high-seas recalculation

In the late 1960s, my mum—a spirited, pretty twenty-year-old English lass—boarded an ocean liner in London bound for Cape Town. She was setting sail for the southern tip of Africa in search of adventure, independence, and the open sea.

Early on during the voyage, she met a chap who seemed to tick every single box. He was handsome, charming, outgoing, and easy to talk to. Mum was thoroughly smitten with him, admiring him from across the deck and happily imagining the possibilities.

Then came the sudden revelation: he was a priest.

Mum was not religious in the slightest. In an instant, every single enthusiastic tick on her mental checklist was unceremoniously wiped clean, replaced by a single, definitive cross. Any budding interest evaporated on the spot.

Sharing a cabin with the priest, however, was a very different kind of man: a balding, slightly built fellow of a far quieter disposition. He didn't command the spotlight, but he had a kind and gentle presence, striking green eyes, and a lovely, warm smile. He had been living and working in London and was on his way back home.

Ah, Mum thought, looking at him with fresh eyes. He’s not bad at all.

His name was Ivor.

Over the remainder of the long voyage across the Atlantic, Mum and Ivor began talking on deck, sharing unhurried conversations, and steadily falling for one another.

By the time the ship dropped anchor in Cape Town, the connection was undeniable. Once ashore, the relationship flourished into marriage, and on their honeymoon, I was conceived.

I’ve always loved reflecting on the razor-thin margins of my own existence. If that charming chap had been a banker or an engineer, my mother might never have glanced twice at the cabin mate. In a very literal sense, I owe my life to a clerical collar.

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.

Family stories: Forgoing the marks

My dad had a story from his student days that he loved telling, one that completely captured my imagination as a kid.

Back when he was at dentistry school, the going was incredibly tough. Anatomy was notoriously the hardest course on the syllabus, and a massive part of surviving it involved grueling lab work and detailed dissections. The end-of-year anatomy exam was the ultimate hurdle, a high-stakes ordeal that combined a massive theory section with a live practical dissection.

Armed with both his pen and his scalpel, Dad walked into the exam hall. Because of the sheer volume of information required to pass, he, like almost everyone else in his class, had been forced to play the odds during his late-night study sessions. He had strategically anticipated what topics would come up and had simply been forced to skip a few sections to save time.

He was crushed when he flipped over the paper and read Question Three: Draw a detailed cross-section of the penis. It was one of the exact topics he had completely left out of his studies.

Whenever Dad reached this part of the story, his eyes would light up with a brilliant twinkle.

"I wasn't the only person in that exam hall," he would say, "who looked down at their scalpel, looked down at their lap, and thought, 'Mmmm, is it worth it?'"

Then, the twinkle in his eyes would grow even brighter, and he’d deliver the punchline he clearly cherished: "Isn't it a good thing I decided to forgo the marks, or you might never have been born!"

Memorable moments: The final word from Hermanus

My mother never quite saw eye-to-eye with her in-laws. She was English, they were South African, and in their eyes, no woman on earth was ever going to be "good enough" for their beloved son. Mum spent years feeling judged and under the microscopic lens of their constant, silent criticism. While my sister and I doted on our grandparents and looked forward to their Sunday visits, Mum spent those afternoons in a state of high-alert irritability.

Eventually, they passed away at a ripe old age. As a final tribute, Mum and Dad drove to Hermanus—the seaside town my grandparents had loved—to sprinkle their mixed ashes from a scenic cliff into the ocean.

It was meant to be a moment of closure. Mum took a cup of the remains and cast them out toward the water. But at that exact moment, the Cape wind whipped up in a sudden, mischievous gust. Instead of drifting gracefully to the sea, the ashes blew straight back, coating Mum’s face in a fine, grey mist of her late in-laws.

"Good God," Mum sputtered, wiping her face in disbelief. "They're having a go at me even in death!"

A couple of years ago, I asked mum if she believed in life after death. She didn't hesitate for a second. "I hope not," she remarked dryly. "That would probably mean I’d have to see my in-laws again."

Family stories: The slow-motion comb

I have always struggled with a deep-seated phobia of making people wait. If I’m even a few minutes behind schedule, a familiar, prickly anxiety begins to bloom. For years, I wondered where this frantic need for punctuality came from, but looking back at our family trips to Muizenberg beach, the source is clear.

Muizenberg was a local institution, and on a good day, the parking lot was a battlefield. Dozens of cars would circle the asphalt like sharks, or as my father would mutter under his breath, "Vultures!"

After a day in the sun, Jo, my mum, my dad, and I would troop back to our cream-colored Volkswagen Variant. Inevitably, a "vulture" would spot us packing our gear and pull up alongside, indicator blinking with predatory expectation. Most people, sensing the pressure, would hurry.

My father was not most people.

We would climb into the car, the waiting driver idling just inches away, ready to pounce on our spot. Instead of turning the key and vacating the space, Dad would reach into his pocket and slowly, deliberately, produce a comb.

Then, he would begin a performance that felt like it lasted a lifetime. In extreme slow motion, he would meticulously comb his mostly bald head. He wasn't just grooming; he was savoring the power. He would check his reflection, adjust an invisible stray hair, and enjoy every agonizing second of making the "vulture" wait.

In the back seat, Jo and I would catch each other’s eyes and roll them toward the ceiling in a silent plea for the earth to swallow us whole. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, a masterclass in petty defiance that Dad absolutely relished.

I think I spent the rest of my life running five minutes early just to compensate for those few minutes in the Muizenberg parking lot. While my dad was finding his bliss in the slow-motion stroke of a comb, he was inadvertently hard-wiring me to never, ever be the person holding up the line.

Memorable moments: The middle way

When I was seventeen, my family flew to Mauritius for a holiday. We touched down at the airport in Port Louis and boarded a bus to be transported to our hotel. Almost immediately, the journey took on a life-threatening quality. The driver operated the vehicle like a bat out of hell, hurtling down the center of the road with terrifying speed.

My mum, who has never been a calm passenger at the best of times, was visibly shaken. We were all sitting right at the front of the bus, giving us a panoramic view of what appeared to be impending doom. As we gripped our seats, we noticed that we weren't alone; many of the other cars were also straddling the white lines, treating the two lanes as one giant suggestion.

My dad, trying to make sense of the chaos, finally spoke up. "Wow," he said to the driver, "everyone seems to drive right in the middle of the road here!"

The driver let out a hearty laugh, not even slowing his pace.

"Yes!" he shouted over the engine. "You see, when the French colonized our island, they forced us to drive on the right. Then the English came and they forced us to drive on the left. Now that we are independent, we drive in the middle!"

It was the perfect lesson in post-colonial logic. While the diplomats were busy drafting constitutions, the bus drivers of Mauritius had found their own way to express their freedom: by occupying every inch of the asphalt at ninety kilometers an hour.

Memorable moments: The Uilenkraal miracle

When I was a kid, my father took me on my very first fishing trip during one of our camping holidays at Uilenkraal. My dad was a man of precision and patience, and he treated the art of angling with a kind of sacred reverence.

I, however, was a disaster. I did everything technically "wrong." I chose the wrong sinker, my hook-setting technique was non-existent, and my casting was so weak the bait practically landed on my own toes. To make matters worse, I couldn't stop talking—shattering the quiet, meditative atmosphere my father lived for.

I was a walking encyclopedia of how not to fish.

But the universe has a wicked sense of humor. Within five minutes of my pathetic, short-range cast, my rod doubled over. After a chaotic struggle, I hauled in a massive, beautiful Steenbras.

My father stared at the silver prize flapping on the sand, then looked at his own perfectly rigged, expertly cast, and profoundly empty lines. He didn't catch a single thing for the rest of the day.

My dad spent the drive home explaining the "physics of the current," but I knew the truth: that Steenbras just wanted me to shut up as much as he did.

Memorable moments: Highlander of the high school

Before I was born, my parents engaged in a titanic struggle over my identity. My father was determined to name me Lambert, after his own father. My mother, however, was equally determined that I would be Graeme.

Thankfully, my mother’s powers of persuasion won the day. I became Graeme Myburgh, and Lambert was relegated to the "middle name" safe zone—sandwiched between Anthony and my surname as a tribute to both my grandfathers.

For years, it stayed hidden, but in my final years of high school, the secret got out. "Lambert" became my nickname. To my surprise, I didn't mind it. My grandfather had passed away by then, and carrying his name felt like a quiet way to keep his memory alive.

It also didn't hurt that Christopher Lambert had just starred in Highlander. Suddenly, my "old-fashioned" middle name wasn't a liability; it was the name of an immortal, sword-wielding hero.

So in the end, Mum won the argument. No doubt about that.

But life has a funny way of balancing things out.

Because despite all that effort…

I still ended up being called Lambert anyway.

Memorable moments: The smouldering scalp

By eighteen, I was already losing my hair. My father was entirely bald, and seeing my future reflected in his shiny scalp every day filled me with a quiet, obsessive panic. I was convinced that no woman would ever look twice at a man whose hairline was in such a rapid retreat.

Then Oliver moved in.

He was my age and, remarkably, even balder than I was. But Oliver didn’t look like a man in despair; he was happy, confident, and had a gorgeous girlfriend who clearly adored him. To me, he was a living miracle.

One evening, we had a heart-to-heart. I confessed my anxieties and told him how much I admired his "Zen" attitude toward his reflection. Oliver leaned back and gave me a wry smile.

"It wasn't always this easy," he admitted. "A while back, I was sitting in the back of the car behind my mum and dad. My father’s perfectly bald head was right there in front of me, staring me in the face. I looked at it with such focused, concentrated vehemence that I felt like a human magnifying glass. I honestly expected his scalp to start smouldering right then and there."

The image of Oliver trying to set his father’s head on fire with the sheer power of his "balding-rage" was too much. I started to laugh. Then he started to laugh. Soon, we were both doubled over, gasping for air in one of those rare, soul-cleansing fits of hysteria.

In that moment, the weight of years of obsession simply evaporated. A few months later, I met Ally, and the issue of my hair—or lack thereof—simply ceased to exist.

It turns out the best treatment for male-pattern baldness isn't a lotion or a pill—it's a housemate with a shiny head and a funny story to tell.