The Farmer’s in the Dell

Dear friends,

Lately I think fairly often of an English nursery rhyme called ‘The Farmer’s in the Dell’ which describes how the farmer gets a wife, the wife wants a child, the child wants a nurse, the nurse wants a dog, the dog wants a cat, etc. etc. etc. Actually, I have discovered that life is a little bit more complicated than that. In our case, both Helen and I are very much looking forward to the birth of our son - due in mid-October. But we’re also discovering that these days it seems that babies want a lot more than just a nurse!

In fact, I have come to the conclusion that starting a family is like being a motor racing enthusiast, or a golf nut. There is a lot of equipment to understand (I am no longer supposed to just call it a “push-chair thingy” and I now know what isofix attachments in a car mean), and it is expensive. You find yourself seeing other people with the same ‘hobby’ and checking out what equipment they’re using. Even asking them why they chose it and what the pro’s and con’s are. Mind you, at least no-one walks up to my stomache and starts talking to it or asking to give it a rub - like it is public property!

We’ve started going to antenatal classes on Tuesday nights, and those have been very informative but also quite an eye-opener. The way our childbirth expert discusses things, much of it sounds a lot like sports psychology: being fit and prepared, focusing on the goal and visualising in your mind your intended outcome, getting into a zone where you no longer are completely aware of your surroundings or pain / discomfort. And yet I have no envy for Helen in giving birth to a child because it’s an impossible thing to have a practice run for, and it’s really difficult to have any idea what your actual experience of it all will be like before it happens (unlike golf for example, where if you visit a driving range or play a few cheeky holes with a friend and then decide it’s crap, at least you haven’t gone through too much discomfort before reaching that realisation).

Helen has coped marvellously well with carrying around what is now a medium-sized but growing melon in her stomache. At night she was beginning to feel uncomfortable but now she sleeps with a large phallic pillow in the bed to help her rest more easily. Freud has a picnic with it all, but at least my wife sleeps better! The outside world meanwhile, for guys at least, seems to divide into two groups: those who don’t have kids shake their heads pityingly and lament the loss of a friend (me) who they expect to see again somewhere on the other side of the impending darkness and unfathomable depths (and I used to be one of these, maybe I still am occasionally when I look at myself in the mirror), and those who have kids and snigger about how your life is basically over and things will get worse or more expensive or probably both, with a generous dose of sleeplessness on the side. But from both sides there is also a positivity: having a child or children seems to bring with it lots of happy, silly, funny, warm and caring moments with someone who is uniquely special to you because they are your very own family. And you get to watch your own biology experiment develop into his or her own person with a common and yet unique experience of the world. I think it would be fair to say that both Helen and I are positively realistic about it all: we are excited, daunted, unashamedly still very ignorant, but looking forward to working it all out and supporting each other as we learn.

Meanwhile, we now finally own our first family home. After lengthy delays due to the inability of the Johannesburg city electricity department to take a decent electricity meter reading which was vital to the transfer of the property, the final week or two of buying the house was quite fraught, with the sellers seemingly making an effort to be as difficult as possible even to the very last day when the property transferred legally at mid-day, but the sellers refused to give up the keys until they finished work at 4pm. Just to keep life from being boring (ha ha) we are also now in the process of renovating our newly purchased house. Some of this work was stuff we learned we would need to do when we were deciding whether to buy the property (and we negotiated some deduction of the purchase price based on this) and some of it we’ve decided to do now because we are not nearly as keen on having to do it with a small person in the house (and because once we’re making a bit of mess we might as well get several messy things done at once!) So far most of the renovations have been going well and we’re looking forward to having them mostly completed soon. In fact, we need to have them completed soon (a source of some potential future grey hairs for me) because we want to move into the house and be set up before the baby arrives - which while scheduled for mid-October, could in fact be anywhere from later September. On that basis, we’re planning to move in over the first weekend in September (just under 2 weeks away) and we’ll be having a house-warming on the 13^th of September - most likely with some walls still not painted as repair work to the plaster is not yet complete and will take a few weeks to dry. 

The farmer may find that his wife and child have needs - but it turns out the farm itself also wants lots of equipment. And for the first time in my life, with a garden to be seen to, I have been having to look at lawnmowers, garden sheds, ladders, kitchen tiles, paint undercoat, and many other things that truly define a rock ‘n roll lifestyle. It seems at the moment like every time I pop into a local hardware or wholesale store for household goods, I come out with my eyes watering from signing a very long receipt! Luckily, Helen and I have been quietly saving away money every month for a while now, knowing that we’d be needing to get quite a few things. And Helen is a genius at finding great bargains in auction houses so we’ve managed to at least start acquiring some furniture of our own to fill this house with. My parents have also very generously given us some furniture that they had in storage in Port Elizabeth, which we recently had shipped up to Johannesburg. Nevertheless, the house is likely to feel a little bit empty at first, and we’ll probably take many years to fill things out a bit more.

I am delighted, particularly given the impending arrival of little Mr B-W, that as of the 21^st of September, I will be joining the history department of St David’s Marist Inanda, a well-established boys high school which is just over 2km from our new home. During my PGCE last year I did one of my teaching practical blocks of a few weeks there, and I am looking forward to being a part of a larger department with other teachers from whom I can learn and gain valuable experience in teaching-craft. It will also be good to be in a slightly more structured environment where routines and timetables are established, and teachers are given a bit more support by the school. I shall be quite sorry to leave many of my students at Reddam, but for me personally it will be good to be close to home, and at a school where I should have opportunities to also get involved in some sports coaching. The one serious down-side is that I am moving from a 4-term school to a 3-term school with no break in-between (St David’s really need me to start as soon as possible but I have to serve out my full term’s notice at my current school) so I will effectively be teaching from 21 July until 3 December this year, with a 5 day half term break in late October. Because teaching holidays are so long, there is scant consideration for paternity leave, so it looks unlikely that I will get more than a couple of days off when the baby is born. So much for long holidays being one of the perks of teaching! But at least I’ll get a nice long holiday in December and I’m looking forward to it already. 

But it has hardly been a year bereft of holiday experiences. I realise now that it has in fact been a very long time since my last blog post, as I have not even mentioned our hike on South Africa’s famous Otter Trail in late April. Given that Helen had just finished her first trimester, it might have been a risky decision for us to embark on a 4-night, 5-day hike. But we’d been invited along by a friend who’d had a few others drop out of their group, and we simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity to hike along the scenic coastline and enjoy ‘roughing it’ a bit - sleeping in log cabins on triple-decker bunk beds, carrying all of our food, clothes and cooking equipment (the Parks Board do provide firewood and there is running water at every camp).

Only 12 people are allowed onto the trail each day and each night is spent at a different camp along the 42km trail, so it really was a special experience to be there (I had walked the trail once before in 2004 when I last lived in South Africa). We did have water purification tablets with us, poles to help our balance to make sure we didn’t fall over, and blessing from the doctor - so it wasn’t a reckless adventure. We were a little bit unlucky with the weather in that it rained a bit on some of the days which meant that we couldn’t always fully enjoy the camps at the end of our days of walking. In fact it rained very heavily just before we started and all through the first night - which made our first night a bit of a miserable experience and meant that we were unable to cross the first major river on Day 2 and had to take an exit route up to a point high above the trail where we were picked up by park rangers and dropped off at the next ‘exit’ route on the other side of the river gorge after a short but very uncomfortable trip in the back of a truck. 

A wet start to the trail in drizzle

The big day of hiking is day 4, when you have to cross the Bloukrans River, which at anything other than low tide meets the sea in full flood and the river valley is then completely impassable. Unfortunately for us, the tide-table showed that low tide was at exactly 8am, but there was 10km of very up-and-down trail to be hiked before we could get to the river valley. Given that the guide for the trail suggested that this walk takes about 5 hours, Helen and the others in our group of 6 very sensibly decided to get up when they were ready, and to hike to the valley but then take another of the emergency exit points up to the top of the escarpment. But I managed to team up with a guy from the other cabin who was grouped with 5 others he didn’t know (and he couldn’t sleep because one of the party in his cabin snored too loudly). So this guy John and I met up at 4:30am and we missioned our way in the dark with head-torches for the first two hours until sunrise at about 6:30am. At times that did make it more difficult for us to find the trail where it was simply a rock painted with a yellow otter paw in the middle of the seashore, but we didn’t get too lost! We pushed hard, up some steep climbs with me encouraging John along the way, and we made it to the Bloukrans river at 7:50am just in time for peak low tide (you can actually cross an hour either side of low tide but no more than that). It was a great feeling to put my shoes back on, on the other side of the river which was only just above knee-high, and to eat a well-earned sandwich for breakfast.

Bloukrans river mouth at low tide

Though it was hard physical work, and we weren’t as fortunate with the weather as we’d have liked, it was a super trip and it made us hugely appreciate modern comforts like hot showers, being able to boil a kettle at the push of a button, and not sharing a 4 square meter space between 6 people (although I suppose plenty of Japanese people do that all the time). 

Nature's Valley - the finish line - with one deceptively treacherous river left to cross!

 In early July Helen and I travelled to Europe where we enjoyed a week-long break in Sicily (the football at the bottom of Italy’s boot) with my parents and Andrew and Romain. It was wonderful to be in the hot Italian weather in the middle of South African winter, and we enjoyed some delicious food, even learning how to cook some of the local specialities, swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, and plenty of interesting cultural and historical excursions to various sites and monuments. In fact one less sophisticated member of our party found it so cultural that at times he turned down old churches and buildings in favour of a decent book and a deck-chair by the pool. Let’s just say that I like people and personalities in history but buildings and architecture don’t always fill me with as much enthusiasm as they seem to do for others. 

After Sicily we also had a week in London - it was a frenetic time catching up with many different friends and also members of both of our extended families. Whenever we’re in London it always feels like we’ve run around non-stop, and yet we’ve not managed to see half as many people as we’d have liked to. But it was good to catch up with at least some of the many friends who we miss from South Africa, and also to touch base with a whole bunch of Helen’s extended family for a night in Hove, as well as to see my cousin Julia and her baby and spend a night with my aunt in the Hertfordshire countryside. I also finally managed to box up my books and some other odds and ends that have been in my parents’ basement since I came to South Africa, and get them shipped for our new house. Unfortunately it took me more than 2 days to do this, which meant that I didn’t manage to take Helen to visit Oxford for a day, as we’d intended. 

 The rugby season is now almost over for us referees of amateur games. It has been a tougher year in some ways: I have been promoted to Pirates Reserve, which is one level below the Pirates Grade referees who are the top group within the Province. People ask me whether they’ll see me on tv some day, but the truth is I’m already too old to merit consideration for higher honours at national level - and above our top referees in the Province there are still several rungs to climb before one makes it onto televised games. But I would love to (and aim to) be a Pirates referee and to have the opportunity to referee some good first team schools and club games. That said, the assessment of referees gets increasingly harsh as you move up, so things which were once minor matters, become ever more scrutinised. So a thick skin and a sense of self-belief are needed even when the game is finished and you are sitting in the stands dissecting things afterwards! But I sometimes just have to remind myself to be less self-critical and I continue to enjoy it when I’m out there on the field. I still enjoy most of my games, so I’ll be sad to see the season come to an end.

For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, you are no doubt beginning to have some of those crisp nights that are still a feature of the Highveld well into Summer and soon the darkness will no doubt begin to close in ever earlier. Meanwhile, Spring is in the air here, just in time for our little boy to arrive. Wherever you are, I love to hear from those of you who do get in touch, and as always, though far away around the world, you are in my thoughts.