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.

Surprises...

Today was my last day of the first school term: an inordinately long term of 13 weeks that has seen most of my students yawning in class – even more than usual! :o) My first term of teaching has been enjoyable – I’ve liked interacting with young people, and getting their inputs and hearing some of their debates. My more senior classes, 10^th and 11^th grade, are unfortunately still very small, which means that they lose out on some of these benefits of interaction and debate with classmates. I still feel like there is a lot for me to learn in terms of making sure that I get the balance right between explaining things to them, and getting them to explain things for themselves, but hopefully they at least find the subject of history interesting and also challenging.

In my school I have experienced several of the organisational and communication challenges that come with a school still being in its early years of development and still in a phase of quite rapid expansion. But I have also started to make some good friends among my colleagues here, people with whom I hope I will stay in touch even if we some day are no longer at the same school. It has been great to learn from these allies about how schools operate, how to deal with tricky situations with students (and there have been at least one or two) and perhaps even more importantly, how to deal with tricky situations with sometimes very demanding parents. Do me a favour – if you one day have a child in Grade 5 (yes, I teach four classes of Grade 5 kids – 20 ten-year olds in one room!) please accept it when I say that the Nobel Prize nominations are not decided in Grade 5 and if your child ‘only’ gets 75% instead of 80%, it really isn’t the most important thing in the child’s life when they are still learning to socialise and to take responsibility for themselves…

As a first year teacher, I don’t really get the full benefit of the longer holidays, and I’ll probably be spending a fair part of at least 2 of my next 3 weeks of holiday preparing materials for next term, including history exams for all of the classes I teach. I am enjoying being able to run the courses as I choose, but at times I feel that the downside is that I have no-one else to turn to as a specialist history teacher, to ask for advice and guidance on everything from assessment to teaching methods.

Outside of school there have been some quite momentous changes in Helen’s and my life also. Firstly, we are in the process of buying a house: the largest and most unpredictable delay in the process is getting the necessary approval paperwork from the local city government – third world problems! The house is in a very central Johannesburg suburb called Atholl, which is quite close to where we currently live. It is a 4-bedroom house with a garden and swimming pool, and we are both delighted to have found somewhere we believe will be our home for many years to come.  We hope that we’ll be able to move in around late July or early August, but at this stage it still isn’t particularly clear when the purchase will be finalised.

We are excited about being home-owners, and also a little bit daunted by the fact that we basically only own beds and bought an outdoor table and chairs as well as all the white goods with the house, but we don’t have much else to sit on or eat off. So we’ll be enjoying trawling auction houses and gumtree for furniture and housey stuff over the next few months.

Realising that there are four bedrooms, the house would seem a bit empty with only two of us. So we’re also delighted that on Monday this week we went for Helen’s 13 week scan and confirmed that Helen is expecting our first child, due in October. If buying a house wasn’t enough of a challenge mixed with excitement, we’re also both very pleased but naturally also a tiny bit nervous about all the changes that having a child will bring to our lives. For now we’re enjoying the fact that Helen feels well and less unsettled than in the first trimester, and that we’re still able to be spontaneous and can sleep in at least one day a week J But so far it has been an enjoyable adventure, and I’m awfully proud of Mrs Butler-Wheelhouse for how well she’s taken everything in stride. She even broke the news to me that she was very likely pregnant, on Valentine’s Day. What a fabulous present!

More immediately, we’re looking forward to our up-coming holidays in just over a week’s time. We’ll be heading down to the coast for a few days at my family’s house in St Francis Bay, and thereafter we’ve been lucky enough to get ourselves a place on the Otter Trail - which is a four night, five day hike along some exquisitely scenic Cape coastline. The hikes each day aren’t too long, and I’ll be making sure that Helen doesn’t carry much stuff at all - and also that we don’t run out of food or pure water for her to drink. Roald Dahl explains in his autobiographical novel “Boy” how his father’s philosophy was to take his pregnant wife on walks where she would see beautiful things - believing that this would help inspire her to have beautiful babies. I’ve had few other outdoor experiences as spectacular as the Otter Trail - so it can’t hurt to find out if there’s any truth to Mr Dahl’s idea.

Meanwhile, by some dastardly coincidence, our child will be born only when the rugby season is over. Cue evil grin and hand-rubbing glee. The season is starting to get into full swing now and I’ve been enjoying being back out on the fields at schools and clubs around Joburg. I’ve had some enjoyable games already (as well as a few more pedestrian outings) but what’s nice is that every game leaves you feeling like there are things you could improve on and learn from, as well as often being physically and mentally challenging at the same time. Running fast enough and far enough to keep up with play, while also making sure that I’m in the right position to see things, and then having to exercise judgement on whether what I see is an issue, or something that can be overlooked for the benefit of the flow of the game. At the same time when the action stops moving as fast, I have to use that ‘down-time’ to communicate with and manage players in terms of their understanding of what I’m seeing, and their attitudes to each other and me. The best games are schools games where the younger boys are often trained in war-cries and chants that make for a fantastically vibrant atmosphere when reffing the more senior games. I really do enjoy my refereeing, and all things rugby, and I hope to continue to grow and improve my skills during the coming season.

I recently turned 33 and marked the occasion with a get-together with family and friends at a spot in Joburg with a lovely view of the city skyline. Luckily I still seem to have people mistaking me for a younger age than I am, so hopefully that leaves me full of youthful energy for all the things we’ve got coming this year.

The response already from the family and friends who’ve heard the news about our house and impending new addition has been wonderfully supportive and we both feel very blessed to have such wonderful people around us. Though I love living in South Africa, especially under the clear blue skies and sunshine of the Highveld winter, I do miss my good friends in so many other places, and hope that those of you reading this from afar will get in touch if you haven’t already.

Back to school

Today was my first day as a teacher. Monday and Tuesday this week were spent in staff meetings and orientation at my new school. (I spent most of December preparing materials for lessons, so in a way it's been nice to finally get into action.) The school is on Waterfall Estate which is an upmarket housing development on the northern edge of Johannesburg (around Kyalami - Midrand). The school buildings and facilities are fantastic, however the school as a whole has only been around for a little over 3 years and is expanding quite rapidly, so things are still quite chaotic at times. As I discovered this morning when every parent in the region seemed to be dropping their child off at the same time and there was a traffic jam in the driveway to the school bigger than anything anywhere else.

I think I had a pretty easy time of things for my first day - I met two Grade 11 (2^nd last year of school) classes, and my only Grade 10 class. It is both a positive and a negative feature that these are all very small classes - my one Gr11 class is two girls, the other one is actually only 1 girl - the other girl who was supposed to be in the class apparently told the school this morning that she won’t be coming back this year as her parents have re-located. In my Grade 10 class there are 4 students in all, including 1 boy. I will no doubt meet many more of the students (and the lower classes are much larger - typically around 20-25 per year) as the week goes on. One of my shocks has been the discovery that in addition to Grades 8-12 (ages 13-17) I will also be teaching 3 classes of Grade 5 students (age 10). I am still not quite sure what I will make of this, but I don’t think I’m planning to be too academically harsh on them, just hoping to get them to begin thinking a little bit.

The school, particularly in the high school, is much more female than male, both in the student body and the staff. I think this may partly be because the school emphasises academics first, but also provides outstanding facilities for arts and drama and has purpose-built music studios, whereas the sports development has lagged behind somewhat - my suspicion is that students who are more sporty go to bigger schools. On the other hand, I do enjoy the fact that it is a non-denominational and co-educational school, so children are not subjected to the religion of the founders of the school regardless of their own beliefs nor enforced segregation from scary other sexes (as seems to have been the traditional model for British schools).  Nonetheless, I am looking forward to getting involved in some sports coaching, and will see where that takes me during this year - I still don’t really know which sports I’ll be involved with.

Next week I will be away most of the week - accompanying the 8^th grade class to the Drakensberg area for a tour of the Zulu battlefields (thankfully there will be a tour guide doing all of the talking as this is hardly an area of personal expertise in history). I will be going with two other teachers for Monday to Friday, so I’m interested to see the dynamics and relationship development between the learners while we’re on the trip, as well as interested to see how my own relationships with both the students and the other teachers (one of whom I seem to have buddied up with a bit already - he’s a Zulu guy and one of the only other male teachers, and also new to the school). So far though, I have to say that I’ve been very impressed by people’s energy and the collegial atmosphere among the staff. Perhaps they know that a good sense of humour is needed to help put up with the chaos in the administration (one area where the school seems to lack resources, although it may also be a reflection of the more creative rather than disciplined or disciplinarian personalities of the key staff members involved in starting up the school and this campus).

Before all of this started, Helen and I had a lovely Christmas holiday. Albeit one peppered with a liberal dose of travelling. We drove down to St Francis Bay from Johannesburg on the 18^th of December (about 1200km), and spent several days there as well as a day in Port Elizabeth when the weather wasn’t great. It was fabulous to be there with my parents, my brother and his partner Romain, as well as my mother’s aunt Helen, so it really felt like a family get-together, not something we always find easy these days when we’re all over the world.

On Christmas day we drove in to Port Elizabeth from St Francis and flew up to Johannesburg to share the celebrations with Helen’s parents and siblings. Now that all three Richards children are married it was a full-family occasion and we all enjoyed it tremendously - including an unusual choice of having delicious shrimps and fish rather than traditional roast or other heavy fare for lunch. It was quite a whistle-stop tour, as Helen and I returned to St Francis that night, but we greatly appreciated being able to share in events with both our families. On the 26^th we took part once again in the Boxing Day mini triathlon in St Francis - somewhere in the middle of it I really did wonder why on earth I was doing it (and why I hadn’t trained a little bit more) - but I managed to get through it somehow!

On the 27^th of December we drove through to Fancourt golf estate in George, and had a lovely time there at the great facilities, including a round of golf, a game of tennis, and a few visits to the gym. Then on the 29^th Helen and I drove to Cape Town for the wedding of some good friends of mine from London: Carly and Greg. Their wedding setting was magical - it was in the garden of Carly’s family home which has a view down to the city bowl from the hills above, and somehow they’d managed to hire a transparent marquee and put fairy lights in the trees around us so it seemed as though we were sitting in an enchanted forest. We then returned to Fancourt for one last night, and back to St Francis on the 31^st for New Year’s eve. Initially we’d thought we’d have a small group of friends joining us just for a little while, but then more and more people decided not only to come to New Year, but to stay the night, and in the end there were about 20 people sleeping in our house that night. We all had lots of fun - although Helen and my room was turned into a dorm-room for us and two other couples, and by 1am, half of each couple (Helen, my friend Frank, and his sister Ann) were fast asleep, while the more energetic halves were all sitting on the balcony talking nonsense until 3am! It was nice to finish off a fabulous holiday with a few relaxing days of sun and beach before we came back to Joburg on the 4th. In future though perhaps we’ll try to reduce the total amount of travel a little bit!

Going further back to other events, this last quarter of the year has witnessed several weddings. On the 15^th of December we saw good friends of ours: Bruce (who has been my brother’s friend since nursery school) and Lexi get married here in Johannesburg. We also felt very privileged to be invited to their family dinner on the Friday night. It was a novel experience to be hosted for the wedding itself at Turbine Hall, which is an old power station in the heart of Johannesburg which has been transformed into a vibrant contemporary venue for weddings and other gatherings.  Another highlight for me was the bachelor party for Bruce - which saw all of us friends of his participating in an afternoon game of cricket, followed by a fines meeting (ritualised drinking) and further beverages until it was a miracle that the groom remained standing when we departed for a nearby bar (although the state of several nearby bushes watered by regurgitation may still be subject to further investigation).

My brother-in-law Bryan tied the knot in October at a fabulous wedding in the Natal midlands that was a great family reunion for the Richards clan. Helen thoroughly enjoyed a good old chinwag with many people who she doesn’t get to see very often, and I got to know several of them just a little bit better. I also revelled in the fact that Helen’s parents kindly put us all up in lakeside cottages which meant that I could have a swim on the Saturday morning before the wedding got underway. The evening was a lovely celebration that eventually involved a number of us (including the groom) mosh-pitting across the dance floor to AC-DC, Guns and Roses, Metallica, and similar things, once all the pop music fans had started to melt away!

It seems amazing that Helen and I have already been married for 7 months - on one hand because that seems so little, on the other because we enjoy each other’s company every day and in some ways it seems like we’ve known each other for much longer than we have. We love living at my family’s place in Eton Park, but nevertheless we’ve started looking at houses where we could build our own home. We’re in no great rush, but we’ve started to eye out possible areas and types of houses that we might like to live in. This has given us several fun Sundays of poking our noses into show houses, and exploring what houses are like in different areas of Johannesburg, as well as seeing the different things that people like to do with their homes (marble spiral staircases in the entrance hall are a big no-no if you ask me!) Who knows, perhaps one of these days we’ll find something that excites us and may be the start of a whole new housing adventure.

Sports-wise, every year I return to the old adage that the problem with Rugby is Summer. While I’ve thoroughly enjoyed some cricket sessions in the nets at Wanderers with Bruce and another mate of ours on Friday afternoons, I realised at his bachelor party that proper cricket would not suit me unless it was with a team of people I really liked spending a lot of time lazing about with (cricket does have rather a lot of standing around or sitting waiting, interspersed with moments of sheer terror and occasional pain when the ball hits you - and unfortunately Bruce and his mates are too good so I can’t join their team). I’m trying to play tennis regularly, although the Highveld Summer tendency to have late afternoon rainfall has not been helping this. I’m also doing my best to get some fitness work and gym in, so that I can cope when rugby season starts again in March sometime (hopefully). And as a welcome-back to being a working person reward, I’ve promised myself satellite television from the beginning of February which should allow me to at least watch rugby again while doing my early morning cycling in the living room!

Tomorrow at school we have our first assembly in the afternoon, and the teachers are responsible for putting on a show. The dance teacher who is co-ordinating these things has decided that the four male staff members will be ‘sugar-plum’ fairies and wear tutu’s and do a small ballet routine. So I do hope that when people say, “break a leg” as I start my new work as a teacher, they aren’t being too literal!

Like many of you no doubt, I’ve made a few New Year’s resolutions - though I’ve already found myself breaking my resolution to ‘floss more’. But I’m really looking forward to 2014 as a year of new and different experiences, and I hope that you are also excited by the prospects to come.

Wishing you lots of love and big hugs from South Africa.

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.