Pictures from the Other Life

Table Bay as the mist lifts in the morning...

These are old, but I was looking for pictures to show Vince, to brace him for the beauty that will assail him when he sees Cape Town (sure, there's a flipside, but not now, not here - he will drive through the flipside, though, on his way from the airport. Nothing like the Third World for contradiction). A couple of years ago I took these pictures on a trip out of Cape Town Harbour round to Clifton, on my brother Anton's boat, acting as support for my niece Gabriella's open sea ski race.


Mon frere: the bigger, male version of me...well, sort of.

The view of Lion's Head in the foreground, with Table Mountain nice and flat behind. Paragliders float like raptors in the air currents above Lion's Head...

Not Cape Town, but the stomping ground of my childhood. The view from Leisure Island, small island in the Knysna lagoon, on the south coast. My mother's parents lived there when my grandfather retired. He fished in this lagoon from his little boat - I must find and scan the pictures I have of my mom line fishing here in the very tidal water...

The Heads, as they are known, beyond which the Atlantic. When he was young my father swam across The Heads, nearly depriving me of any knowledge of him...The roads on Leisure Island are still very quiet, there are still old people who live gentle lives, and small children who paddle in the flopping waves that scared me silly at night as a child, lying on the second floor of the house we rented, and that we called Pinky, even though she was painted white. Uncle Reg, my cousin Andy's dad, used to play Sand Lions with me (involving a lot of crawling and digging and squealing and some roaring). I think we were offered Pinky, at a price that now resembles a song, but that then, in the 70's, seemed too dear, and my dad turned it down.

One now pays for the privilege of Leisure Island, and sometimes it seems worth it.

What price memory rendered intact?