October already...

An email from a friend of mine in Switzerland reminded me that I have not updated my blog in some time, and all of a sudden it is already October, and Helen and I have already been married for five months. Time seems to fly when you’re having fun!

In early July Helen and I finally gave ourselves a real opportunity for a honeymoon, as we went to Singapore and Malaysia for ten days. We were royally treated by my old friend Jin from Oxford University, who showed us many great dining spots in Singapore, and also explained much of the history of the country to us as he showed us round. In Kuala Lumpur we were lucky enough to stay with Jin’s parents, who also spoiled us completely. To add a bit of honeymoon flavour, we also spent several days at a resort hotel in Langkawi, further north in Malaysia, where we ate a wide variety of foods, and had a relaxing time reading and generally chilling out. Our one bit of amusement was that on the second last day of our stay the water supply to that part of the island stopped working properly (after monsoon-like rains on our first night there which had woken me up in the middle of the night when water started pouring through a hole in the roof straight onto me in my bed!) The water shortage however meant that at the end of a hot sweaty day (in which we’d gone to use the lobby toilets where there were buckets to refill the cistern tanks) we had to sneakily rub soap all over ourselves and then go and jump into the officially closed hotel pool to wash ourselves off before going to bed. We were very glad to return to spend one more day with Jin in Singapore before departing late that night for South Africa – not least because he had working showers! We ate and drank so many interesting and different things – from jelly juice (a sort of juice with little bits of jelly in it – Helen liked that much more than I did, I thought it seemed a bit like frog-spawn in a glass) to a wide variety of Chinese dishes, excellent dim-sum, home-made Indian food, and even Singaporean rice porridge. My personal favourite though was Singaporean breakfast: toast with kaya (a sort of jam made from a local plant which gives it a greenish colour, mixed with coconut and sugar) and soft eggs. Now Helen is a big fan of breakfast eggs, and has converted me to liking them as well, but she wasn’t so keen on the Singaporean style: which is boiled at 65 degrees so that the egg is just a bit cooked and then you crack it open, mix with soy sauce and pepper and whip together into a sort of runny egg-soup that is slurped from the bowl or into which you dip your kaya toast. 

We returned from Asia to packed schedules. Helen got stuck into her new job, in which she manages the relationship between her agency and one of South Africa’s biggest banks, who are well known for their innovative marketing, but can also be an incredibly demanding client who (not atypically for their industry) at times seem not to be entirely reasonable in their demands. Somehow she keeps them happy with a smile on her face and a courtesy that I surely could not hope to match (lucky thing too, I’d have been fired from Helen’s job long ago and she’s the sole breadwinner this year!) At the same time, I started six weeks of teaching at a government school for boys called King Edward, which used once to be an all-white school and therefore is blessed with a strong old boys club, and outstandingly good sports facilities. These days KES, as it is known, is home to boys from a wide variety of socio-economic and racial backgrounds and also has teachers from many different cultures. It is a large school, with nearly 1200 boys in 5 grades of high school, and has a strong reputation as one of the best sporting schools in Johannesburg. I taught five classes: two grade 9 Social Science (combined history and geography) and two grade 9 Economic and Management Sciences (basically accounting, business management and a little bit of economics), and a grade 11 history class. Of these, my favourite was the Grade 11 history, who were a smallish class with a range of levels of aptitude, but I found ways to engage with many of them and enjoyed some of the discussions and debates we had in class, as well as the learning I had to do myself, in order to be able to teach them about South Africa’s apartheid history (given that my own history studies have only ever very briefly touched on South Africa’s history). 

Mid-way through my teaching practical period of 6 weeks, Helen and I again jetted off overseas. This time for two weeks in the UK and Sweden. It was my first return to Sweden since 2010 when I moved to South Africa, and I very much enjoyed showing Helen some small glimpses of a country I love, and introducing her to many people there who have been great friends to me over the years (including meeting up with one friend who I had not seen in over 16 years since we left Sweden, but who I had re-connected with on facebook). 

 It was also the occasion of my mother’s 60^th birthday, and we feel lucky to have been there to share in that celebration as well. Back in London we also showed each other some of our favourite restaurants, I showed Helen my flat at Barons Court, and she showed me where she once lived in Brixton (including an amusing few drinks at a Jamaican-style pub called Hootananny with a lot of Rastafarian types). We also had a UK celebration of our wedding, for which my parents very kindly hosted almost 90 people made up of various friends, and members of extended family from both sides. It was great to meet many more of Helen’s family, and also to see a great number of our friends in the UK who made the effort to be there and share in the celebration with us. I also enjoyed meeting up with two high school friends now based in the USA who both somehow got their holidays to the UK to coincide with our wedding celebration, one of whom I have been in touch with over the years but actually hadn’t seen face to face since 1999 when I graduated from high school in London. Two weeks actually felt like far too little, and there is still lots Helen and I want to show each other in the UK and I would love to have more time to spend with many of the friends we only briefly managed to catch up with during our visit. 

My teaching experience at KES finished up in the first week of September, and my stint at what is quite a rough and tumble school taught me a lot about how very different the cultures of different schools can be. I saw how enjoyable teaching can be, but also how many teachers are eventually worn out by years of telling kids to shut up and sit down; with many of older teachers fantasising that when they were young, scholars were polite and diligent - my father’s own recollections of his schooling suggest that there always will be children (boys in particular, I dare suggest) for whom school is simply not the right environment to bring out the best in them. I had some very interesting chats with various teachers and the headmaster of the school, and it was intriguing to consider that contemporary discussions around school management are increasingly having to focus on the damaging effects being felt in many schools, of the breakdown of family structures and lack of discipline in family lives, which makes it much harder for scholars to adjust to the discipline and work ethic required to succeed in most typical school environments, where resources are often scarce, and the kind of one-on-one counselling and mentorship that many children would benefit from, simply isn’t always readily available. Teaching is also a job, and not everyone who does it is motivated by the same things. I very much enjoyed getting involved in coaching the under 14 basketball team while at KES, but my first priority was my academic subjects, whereas some teachers were primarily sports coaches who also taught academic subjects. I have to admit that I was also reminded again of how many young people seem to have quite poor reading and writing skills – and it reinforced my own personal belief that if I had to choose as a parent, I would try to give my child the best possible primary school education, and a decent secondary school education – in the belief that a child who can read and write really well will be much more likely to excel later even if their teaching isn’t always of the highest standard. That said: I prefer to teach secondary school because there is critical thinking beginning to take place, and some increasing recognition of the odd nuances and contradictions in the real world. 

 Shortly after resuming lectures at Wits in September, we had a most enjoyable weekend away in Limpopo province, going north toward South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe to a farm owned by the family of some friends of ours. It was a relaxing time of trying (badly) to fly-fish, playing farm tennis and cricket on their cracked old tennis court, and enjoying good company and the odd glass of wine or beer. We have been enjoying the gradual emergence of Spring, and now it seems as though Summer is almost upon us – as the days get hotter and the nights lack the biting cold we often have in winter. Rugby refereeing has been pretty much over since the end of August, a disappointingly brief season this year it seemed, and now I shall have to turn to tennis and squash to keep me amused until next year March probably. Two weeks ago, we did however join our friend Nicola’s team of 5 of us for something called the Impi challenge – which involved a 12km run combined with about 20 different obstacles – including climbing over walls, vaulting over 6 foot high poles, crawling on our bellies under barbed wired, through a muddy tunnel half submerged in water, and traversing lots of muddy terrain, as well as jumping off a bridge about 6 or 7 meters high into a dam. It was tiring, but good fun, and I was proud of how well Helen did. 

This past weekend has left me a little bit the worse for wear, as I organised a group of 16 of us who went to Ellis Park Stadium here in Johannesburg on Saturday to watch the New Zealand All Blacks play against the Springboks, the number 1 ranked rugby team in the world against the number 2. It was a game with much hype and anticipation, as South Africa started the day with the possibility of winning the annual Southern Hemisphere international rugby tournament, if they could beat New Zealand, and also prevent them from scoring 4 tries. Despite me not having much voice left after yelling myself hoarse in support of the Boks, unfortunately the All Blacks were simply too good on the day, and ran out deserved winners as they capitalised on some poor defensive mistakes by the Boks. For neutral observers it was an action-packed and high-quality encounter. For passionate Springbok fans like me, it was a reminder that our team still has some way to go before they will match the consistency and quality of execution of the All Blacks. But it is a young Springbok team with a lot to look forward to. 

I myself have some good things to look forward to. This coming weekend we will be travelling down to the Natal midlands for my brother-in-law Bryan’s wedding to Elaine. It will be a great opportunity to see many of Helen’s family again. My studies at Wits should be complete by the end of the first week of November, which is also good news. In terms of my own peace of mind, the most important development in the last few weeks is that I have secured a job for next year. I will be teaching history to grades 7 to 11 at the Waterfall Estate campus of a group of schools called Reddam House, which is already well established in Cape Town, on Johannesburg’s East Rand in Bedfordview, and on two campuses in Australia. It is a private, non-religious, co-educational (boys and girls) school with selective intake. The high school is still relatively small, but the primary school is growing quickly, and the pre-school has over 500 children, who in time are expected to filter through to the main school. I expect that my first year will be a daunting work-load, particularly as I will be the only history teacher at the school and expectations are high given that I have been offered this job despite having much less experience than other interviewees. But I am fortunate in that I should be able to gather some teaching materials from those who have taught history to grades 7-10 over the past few years, and to mould this to my own liking, rather than having to start from scratch (as I will have to with the Grade 11 who are the first class to enter this year group – South African law does not allow a school to admit learners for their Grade 12 final year of schooling until the school has existed for at least three years). The school is not particularly strong in sports, as it is still a very small high school, though the drama and music facilities are outstanding and the physical infrastructure that is present means that in time they should be able to develop much more strength in sports as well. For now, although I will be expected to offer two afternoons a week of extra-curricular assistance and will likely do so by contributing to rugby and basketball coaching, given that I also am required to offer additional tutoring if required on two afternoons per week, I think I will be quite glad to have at least some time for academic preparation rather than there being a completely full sporting calendar as well. I do plan to devote most of November and early December to planning lessons and gathering materials for next year.

It has been a great year so far, and I hope that this last quarter will continue in much the same vein (albeit with a few more Springbok victories, thank-you very much). If you’re reading this, I hope you are well and my thoughts are with you. If you haven’t dropped me a line in a while, please do let me know how you are – several times this year I have been reminded of how rewarding it is to still have friends whom time and distance have not parted from me.

The last few months have been quite busy and eventful, but also filled with happiness.

In early April, having agreed that we would just go out for dinner on the 4^th, I was wonderfully surprised when Helen secretly got together a whole lot of our friends who met us at a local restaurant to celebrate my 32^nd birthday. I must admit that I do find it hard to think of myself as being that old, and a lot of time I struggle to remember that it’s now my age (must be the first hints of dementia) – I can still remember quite fancying a girl who I never quite mustered the courage to try and kiss when I was 12 years old, and now suddenly that is 20 years ago!

April was filled with quite a bit of studies and lots of preparation for the big events to follow, as well as a fair amount of refereeing. By the last week of April, my parents arrived in South Africa, and shortly thereafter so did the first of my friends from as far as Singapore, and as near as Port Elizabeth. My best man Frank organised me a superb bachelor’s party on the evening of Tuesday 30^th April (Wednesday the 1^st is a public holiday in South Africa). We began the evening with a fun but tiring game of touch rugby (in which I had to wear a ballerina’s tu-tu with a Springbok emblem adorning it) after which we headed out to a local night-life area for some food and a significant number of beverages, for which I was dressed in a t-shirt with a picture of a bride and groom and the caption “Game Over”. My future brother in law was ‘kind’ enough to prevail upon me to have a shot of tequila with a Mopani worm in it, and someone made a stupid bet with me to dance on a table with my shirt off (even sober that would have been an unlikely challenge), and my poor Colombian friend Juan had to suffer through me revealing his dark past at 1am, but despite some of the finer details of the later parts of the evening being somewhat vague the next morning, it was an evening of good fun among many friends and family.

On the Friday night, Helen’s parents kindly hosted a gathering of all the members of both our families who were attending, so that they could all meet each other before the big day. It was a very relaxed way to start to put a face to many of the names I had heard over the course of our usual Monday night dinners at Helen’s parents’ house, and I think it made everyone that bit more comfortable on the day of the main event.

Saturday dawned with me alone in bed as Helen had followed the tradition of not being seen by the groom on the wedding day, and had stayed over at her parents’ house. Knowing myself, I had decided well in advance that since ours was a late afternoon ceremony, and that I didn’t want to spend the day thinking about things too much, I gathered a group of several friends who had travelled from far afield to be there (including London, Basel and Singapore) and took them with me to a school where I refereed a rugby game that morning to give me some exercise and keep myself focused on things within my control. We went on to a local restaurant for a nice hearty brunch, before heading home to prepare ourselves.

Having put a great deal of planning into place for the wedding, including holding a rehearsal at our venue the day before, when I arrived at the Rand Club, an ornately beautiful if somewhat faded colonial edifice, it was to find that things were running smoothly and Helen was already upstairs elsewhere in the building preparing herself (as far as I was concerned, that meant my biggest worry for the day – that she might come to her senses and run away – was resolved). My best man Frank did a great job of forcing me to absent myself from further logistical arrangements, and basically told me to let things happen and that he and my other groomsmen would take care of any issues. That said, about half an hour before the main bevy of guests was due to arrive, he walked over to me and said, “There’s been a slight problem, but it is being solved…” It turned out that the bus we had organised to transport more than half of our guests from a hotel in Northern Johannesburg to the downtown area (so as to save them issues with parking and directions in an unfamiliar part of town) had not arrived to pick them up! Luckily my mother saved the day by very quickly getting the hotel management to call up a cavalcade of taxi’s to transport the 75-odd guests who had planned to take the bus.

Though it started slightly late, once things got rolling, it was an unforgettable day. The layout of the club is such that once all of the guests had arrived (and I was able to welcome many of them personally as they entered the club) they were then very efficiently chaperoned to their places along two wide, deeply carpeted staircases above a landing in the middle of the stairs between the ground floor and the first floor. Our master of ceremonies Bruce did a fantastic job of herding people through the different stages of the event, and was superbly aided in this by my Helen’s brother Bryan and my brother Andrew, who also gave us a reading from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin during the ceremony. Helen made her entry down a smaller staircase to the side of the room from the 2^nd floor above the assembled gathering, and then gracefully made her way down the main staircase on her father Nigel’s arm. She wore a spectacular ivory-coloured dress and was radiantly beautiful.

The ceremony itself remains something of a blur in my memory, although I know I blubbed like a little girl several times – such was my sense of being overwhelmed by having Helen by my side as I stood on that landing surrounded by all the friends and family looking down to where we stood, and feeling quite awed by how many special people we were lucky to have with us for the day and how obvious it was that they cared deeply for us and shared in our happiness.

We kept our photography session after the ceremony mercifully brief (we're still waiting for the results of our official photography!), and this was followed by finger-food starters and a welcoming speech from my new brother-in-law Bryan, who congratulated a number of family members and friends who have already, or will during the course of 2013 be turning 60-years old. This was followed by an amusing speech from Nigel, introducing the Richards family, and also Helen. My parents spoke also, at the end of the starters, about the Butler-Wheelhouse and Bosworth-Smith families, and also about how Helen fits into our family very nicely, sharing the same birthday as my mother’s father, and the same name as my maternal grandmother.

At the end of the main course, which was a Cape Malay style fish curry, my best man Frank gave a heart-felt and incredibly kind speech. Not painting over my flaws (well Helen knows these) but explaining that many of them are a counterpoint to my best intentions and ambitions. I was touched by Helen’s sincere and expressive words, as she is by nature a much more private person than I, and yet in front of all those people she put into words the feelings we share. With so many loved ones there, I felt fortunate to be able to thank not only our families but also our friends for all of their kindness and support, and also to be able to explain to them all a little bit of why Helen makes my life so much richer for being herself within it. The rest of the evening was filled with lots of fun: dancing, having a few drinks, and enjoying sharing the day with all the people there with us.

On Sunday morning we had a brunch at our flat, which was a lovely opportunity to catch up with many people, as a wedding is often not a good time to actually get a chance to talk to people. But, by mid-day, having been socialising with people since Friday afternoon, I finally ran out of steam and wanted nothing more than to have everyone leave so that I could share some peace and quiet with my new bride. Unfortunately our honeymoon was doomed to be a brief affair due to the commitments of my PGCE course (which Helen was wonderfully understanding about) so we drove about 90 minutes outside of Johannesburg to a luxurious hotel where on Sunday evening we enjoyed the spa, ordered room-service to go with our complimentary bottle of champagne and fell asleep by about 9pm! It was a well-deserved rest after several weeks of increasing intensity in our efforts to organise and prepare everything for the wedding and we both very much enjoyed our few days of sumptuous buffet breakfasts, walks and mountain bike rides within the grounds of the hotel, even a brief gym session, and several visits to the spa, including a rejuvenating full-body massage.

On Thursday after the wedding I began my first real block of practical teaching experience. I spent two and a half weeks teaching History, as well as filling in a bit in the Geography department of a local private Catholic boys school called St David’s Marist Inanda. It is a very well-run school and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting the staff, and getting to know the boys: I had a Grade 10 history class, and a Grade 8 history class (it was interesting to see in practical terms the different levels on which I had to teach these different ages of boys), as well as taking 2 Grade 8 classes of Geography. Some of my time in-between those classes I spent preparing lessons and materials for teaching, but some of it was also spent observing various other teachers’ classes and seeing their different styles and approaches, even to the same content and learner age-groups. It was also interesting to see how the different classes varied in their interactions and characteristics – with some being more participative, some more fractious, and some less engaged than others with the various subjects being taught. It was a great experience and I would feel privileged to be able to teach somewhere with boys (or boys and girls) as willing to participate and eager to learn.

I was very fortunate that this school is less than a kilometre from our house (it was my first choice nomination for this teaching experience) as I was unfortunately involved in a car accident on the Wednesday before this teaching experience started. Luckily, no-one was hurt, but my poor little red car, nicknamed Porky, was a write-off, and for a few days I was car-less. I am incredibly lucky that my mother’s cousin Jane was heading to Europe for a week shortly thereafter, and she very kindly let me borrow her car while she was away. I have now purchased a replacement vehicle – a used VW sedan that is running very nicely.

I have started to make contact with various schools in the Johannesburg area, and have even been fortunate enough to meet with headmasters and deputy head-masters at a couple of the schools I have written to. So hopefully over the next few months I will be able to secure myself a good place to start out my teaching career next year. Helen meanwhile has had a tumultuous few months at work, with her relationship with her boss deteriorating to the point where Helen decided to move on, and fortunately she has managed to find a new opportunity at a very highly-regarded digital advertising agency where she will be starting in July.

At the end of my teaching experience Helen treated me to a lovely surprise: a weekend away in Cape Town. Despite cold, foggy, grey weather, we very much enjoyed meeting up with some of Helen’s family, taking a trip to Robben Island (although I was thoroughly disappointed to find that the little notices which used to be located in each cell, telling in their own words of the experiences of political prisoners who had been in that cell, were no longer there), visiting a quaint little marketplace called ‘Biscuit Mill’ that reminded me of London’s Borough Market, and later eating out at a Mexican restaurant called El Burro (which has to be one of the finest restaurants in South Africa) as well as beating off the gloom with a Sunday afternoon spent exploring many different flavours at a wine and food convention.

South Africa is now well into the rugby season, and I have been very much enjoying my refereeing. Although my father was kind enough to accompany me a week before the wedding to a very disorganised rugby tournament in one of our more underprivileged township areas, in general I have found that this year the quality of games I have been lucky enough to referee has improved steadily, and also that I have been able to gradually absorb more of the teachings of our referee coaches and to use these to make my management of games more effective. I was very pleased to find out at our most recent society meeting last week, that I have been promoted to Level 1 within the provincial referees society (new referees are Level 4). My next step will hopefully be to graduate in time to being named a Pirates-reserve referee – as the Pirates referees are the top referees in the province. But it will take many more games for that to happen!

I soon have mid-year exams coming up but we are also looking forward to some great holidays. In the first week of July, just before Helen starts her new job, we’ll be heading to Singapore and Malaysia for a proper holiday, perhaps in part to make up for our all-too-brief honeymoon. And then in August we’re going to be in Sweden for my mother’s 60^th birthday, and then in London on the 17^th we’re having another celebration of our wedding with family and friends in that part of the world (do let us know if you can join us).

Being married has been a great experience so far, and I continue to feel lucky every day that I have Helen in my life.

Please do get in touch if I haven’t heard from you in a while – for me it is a blessing to have so many great friends in so many different corners of the world. 

The only thing you can ever be sure of is that things don’t stay the same!

Friends, it has been some months since my last update, and it feels like there has been a whirlwind of activity in the time that has passed.

In November last year I left my job as a project manager in the international finance department at ActionAid, and moved to working for a small property company in Johannesburg. I did this for a number of reasons: firstly, to put myself in a more entrepreneurial environment, secondly to learn about sales and marketing (I worked as a commercial and office property broker – earning commission only) and thirdly because it is clear that there is a still a lot that is likely to happen in the development of property in Johannesburg, a city that remains very horizontal, and is only now seeing increasing densification, mixed zoning, and intensification of land use in order to reduce distances and transport pressures for residents and businesses.

My work for the property company was quite a steep learning curve in terms of understanding the commercial property market, how property leasing works, getting to know the big landlords, and familiarising myself with vacant office spaces in my area. I very much enjoyed meeting with different potential clients, finding out about their businesses, and helping them to narrow down their choices and view potential spaces for their businesses. However, as is probably the case in many areas of the world, the global economic downturn has not had a positive effect on the local property market, which remains quite stagnant, with many businesses not expecting to grow substantially, and therefore not requiring much change in their property needs. In addition, I found that I was teaching myself everything, as the opportunities to learn from others within the small company I worked for were very limited (many colleagues were friendly, but very busy, while management took a sink-or-swim approach to matters, offering limited insight). While I had many good meetings and worked very hard, I found that the competition in the industry was intense, and that there are simply too many property brokers out there chasing too few deals, and the deals that got done were frequently made on a basis of personal connections to decision makers in the commercial world – which I, after many years abroad, was somewhat lacking.

Helen was amazingly supportive of my bold new adventure, despite the fact that it meant a fairly significant change in lifestyle as I moved from a comfortable professional salary to living on my savings (I couldn’t take her out for dinner as often, and we cancelled our satellite television contract – a real hardship when the important rugby games simply passed by! :o) What was liberating about the job was that I was totally responsible for my own business decisions and success. And it allowed me to really begin to explore what makes me happy about a job, and what is simply a means to an end. And having this space and opportunity for self-reflection, allowed me to fundamentally re-assess where I see myself going in life, and how I can get there. Many of you will know that I have never felt that my career has ‘clicked’ – I’ve often enjoyed little parts of what I’ve been doing, and I have often wanted to find ways to expand into making more opportunities for myself, but lamented that I don’t seem to have a base as a truly capable or perhaps even excellent practitioner of my field (as those who saw me pass several accounting exams by the slightest of margins, would no doubt attest).

Having realised that I simply do not know enough about property, nor would I be able to learn fast enough to be in any position to be a real force in the industry when the market next turns (which I suspect it will within the next 2-3 years), I was then left to ponder alternatives, bearing in mind the thinking I’d put into what makes me happy and what drives and stimulates me. And I kept coming back to something that many friends may have heard me mention at times, that some day I’ve considered becoming a teacher. I always felt that it wasn’t something one should do without the benefit of some life experience, but also something I felt that I could perhaps be good at. And the more I thought about this notion, and how much I’ve enjoyed interacting with young people when I’ve been refereeing at schools on Saturday mornings, the more I began to wonder why, despite several times previously having begun to or even completed submitting applications to study a postgraduate certificate in teaching (PGCE), I’d always ended up deferring my placement or withdrawing. I spoke with family and friends about this idea. Many were initially quite shocked – we all know teaching can be incredibly demanding on one’s time and emotional commitment, as well as not being a likely path to millionaire’s row. But as I thought things over, I realised that creating a sense of self-worth through engaging in a career with meaning for me, and feeling able to foster a spirit of learning and knowledge in others, as well as being a role model and a person worth respecting – are things that matter to me. As are the possible opportunities that teaching could offer not only to mix my desire for intellectual stimulation, with my passion for sports, but also perhaps to create chances to live and work overseas at some point, and to be able to be a family-oriented person while sustaining a successful career.

The result is that I was accepted at the very last minute, in early February, to take up my deferred place on the PGCE course - studying full-time this year at Witwatersrand University. The course has been intellectually and emotionally challenging, as well as a social exploration: as I’ve met and got to know classmates from so many different backgrounds of class, race, religion and outlook on life. I’m very much enjoying the course, and thoroughly grateful to Helen, my family, and Helen’s family, as well as so many of my friends who have supported me and encouraged me as I’ve come to this point where I am excited and nervous about the challenges and adventures this path is likely to hold for my future.

It is ironic in many ways that I am studying at Wits, because it was at this very university that my parents met and fell in love, later getting married just as my mother finished her final year of studies in 1973. I meanwhile, am due to be married in early May, right in the middle of this course. Preparations for the wedding are going well, although at times it has simply felt like a mad deluge of things for us to do, service providers to organise, and choices to make – with hardly anything left of our evenings and weekends for extravagances like actually talking to friends! But Helen and I have managed to enjoy making those decisions and have worked hard to try to incorporate and acknowledge our families as part of those processes, while not losing sight of our own vision of how we want things to happen. No doubt some minor disaster will occur on the day, but we’re hopeful that by getting our ducks in a row, we can try to limit the scale and effects of any disaster that does occur – wishful as that thinking may be.

The Christmas holiday was really the last significant break either of us has had, and I’m sure that many of you are also wondering how it can possibly be mid-March already – with the beginning of the year feeling like a crazy busy time for many of us. It was lovely to spend a few days in St Francis Bay with my parents, as well as attending a series of weddings before and after that holiday (by then we were analysing and taking mental notes at every one of them!) Work for Helen continues to be pressurised and with a seemingly unending list of things to get done, but she seems to be enjoying interacting with clients and colleagues, and thriving on the challenges of coping in a small but rapidly changing business. Unfortunately, because I have to start my first practical teaching period (3 weeks in a local high school) in May, we will only be having a very short honeymoon of 2 nights then. But we’re already hugely looking forward to our trip to Sweden and the UK in August – and in many ways we see that as our real honeymoon.

In January Helen and I moved in together, and although at first we figured we’d probably stay at her flat, in the end, we realised that my family are being generous enough to let us live at Eton Park for a while, and that a spacious complex with a big swimming pool and green lawns for picnics is hard to beat. It’s been fabulous to know that whatever the trials of the day, I can come home to a welcome hug from my fiancée. And we’ve very much enjoyed adding little touches to the place to make it our own: from getting a few pieces of furniture inexpensively re-upholstered and moving some of Helen’s furniture into the place, to re-painting some of the walls (note to self, painting is hard work and if possible one should always make use of an unequal society to get someone else to do the work better and cheaper than you can do it yourself!), to getting some carpets replaced, and adding a few small art works of our own to the walls. These are still interim measures in some ways, as eventually we have visions of finding our own home, but we’re both tremendously grateful that we can stay at Eton Park in the meantime.

It hasn’t all been work and no play, we’ve still managed to have fun: I made a trip down to Port Elizabeth to catch up with old friends and to see the first ever Super Rugby game played by the newest franchise – the Southern Kings. We were all thoroughly delighted to witness an unexpected victory by the Kings in a game that was hard-fought and filled with excitement – and played in front of a crowd as tough and uncompromising but also enthusiastic as the industrial heartbeat of Port Elizabeth. Helen and I also recently had a weekend away down in the beautiful mountain surroundings of the town of Clarens, with my folks just before they went back to the UK. And we are looking forward to getting away on another short weekend break over Easter with Helen’s folks. Just to keep us young, not long ago we also gathered together a group of friends and family, and after some belly-warming margarita cocktails made with a vintage tequila given to Helen by her brother, we made our way to the East Rand to Johannesburg’s oldest rock and metal club, where we had a thoroughly good party with several sore heads the result the next day!

Having seen a small taste of being called ‘Sir’ (odd but not a new experience as it’s what most people address referees as) and wearing a tie every day (the KGB used people’s ties to strangle them, enough said…) during my first week of the PGCE course which was spent observing lessons at a well-respected private school, I am looking forward to getting my first sustained spell of actual teaching experience in early May, but before that there’s plenty of studying to be done, rugby games to be refereed, little weekend breaks to be had, and the ‘minor’ matter of a wedding coming up. Life promises to be exciting and challenging, and I hope that you are all well and enjoying yourselves wherever you read this.