Author Archives: bewilderbeast

It's about life, marriage, friends, raising kids, paddling rivers, travel in Africa . . . thoughts written over decades - at random, I'm afraid. NOTE: NO PERMISSION TO SCRAPE MY CONTENT FOR LLM OR AI, you bastards! Dincha mothers teach you not to steal!?

Colonel Freddie Hodgson

I suddenly thought of old Freddie and wondered where his books were. He came to me for his eyes and sold me a book he’d written: From Hell to the Himalayas. Later he added to it and published a second, thicker edition. Made me buy one of the new ones too! A charming and persuasive rogue was old Freddie, Colonel CF Hodgson.

He must have been about ninety in the shade in 1980 which means born ca 1890. Got pushed around in a wheelchair by his young girlfriend – probly a mere seventy year old. She was very good to him. He ordered her (and everyone else) about with supreme confidence, pointing his walking stick at things and directions to go. Yes, he was in a wheelchair but he still carried a walking stick. He was an officer in the British army after all, and was stuck in the days when that meant you were king of the world.

Having thought of him, I went looking for him. On the ‘net of course. Eventually found something on germanmilitaria.com. It seems he must have shuffled off this mortal coil, gone to the big officers mess in the sky, as his medals and his book are for sale as a bundle.

Col Freddie Hodgson

The writing on the card the medals are pinned to reads: “Bombardier to Colonel; C.F. Hodgson, Royal Field Artillery; Commissioned 8:8:17; Wounded; Wrote a book ‘From Hell To The Himalayas’; Book comes with medals and medal entitlement card”;

The seven medals (three WW1 and four WW2) and the book can all be yours for $875. The sales pitch:

An interesting grouping of seven medals ranging from WWI to WWII and a career that is documented in his written autobiography of “From Hell to the Himalayas” (King & Wilks Publishers). The medals are affixed to a section of heavy white coverstock with a handwritten notation. The medals are in order: 1914-1915 Star, British War Medal 1914-1920 (engraved “2 Lt. C.F. Hodgson”), Victory Medal (engraved “2nd Lt. C.F. Hodgson”), 1939-1945 Star, British Commonwealth Africa Star, Burma Star and the 1939-1945 War Medal. The hardcover book is a first edition, printed in 1983 with a colour dust jacket. The book measures approximately 15cm x 21cm and consists of 206 pages with a section of 12 pages with black and white photographs to the center. Also included is a black and white glossy photograph with “Col. C.F. Hodgson (France)” to the reverse, as well as photocopied pages showing his career in WWI as a Bombardier in the RFA, through to WWII.

I can’t find his books on my shelves at the moment. They’ll be here somewhere. When I find them I’ll quote some or other bombastic comment by the bombardier. I’m sure there’ll be one!

~~~oo0oo~~~

Bruce in a Tiger Moth

The de Havilland Tiger Moth is a tailwheel biplane first built in the 1930s. It was used by the RAF and remained in service until the early 1950s. Many of the military surplus aircraft remain in widespread use as recreational aircraft.

The de Hairless Soutar is a tale-spinning Jaguar driver first built in the early 1950s. He was used by the SAAF and remained sort-of in service until the early 1980s. Surplus to military requirements, he nevertheless is still widely seen recreationally.

He recently went for a spin in a moth-eaten jacket and sent me some pics:

Astonishingly, this plane is older than, yet in better condition than, this pilot!

~~oo0oo~~

Trauma

So I’m heading into public view again after a long while ‘under the radar’. The Contact Lens Congress in Jo’burg. My shirts are looking tatty. Frayed around the collars so I need a makeover. I’ll get some new shirts. Long-sleeved. Blue-ish. And a new pair of work trousers. Dark.

Little did I know what trauma awaited me . . .

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Dad’s Coffee Cups in Cairo

In the Cairo bazaar Dad watched an Armenian man making coffee cups.

He worked on a wooden lathe that his father had hand-made, he said. He was spinning silver – thin sheets of silver – a wheel presses the silver onto a wooden cup-shaped form as it rotates, spreading and shaping the metal.

wooden lathe_2.jpg
I’ll check with the ole man what the lathe looked like – maybe like this?

He said he imported his porcelain inserts or inlays from Czechoslovakia and added them to his silver tea and coffee cups for his signature look.

Dad bought two sets from him, and paid him 5 Egyptian pounds, “worth way less than English pounds” he says.**

That was back in 1943. Nowadays Saad of Egypt are Cairo’s best-known silversmiths. Saad was born in 1939. He says he still forges his own silver “in the tradition of Zorayan the Armenian, which his children unfortunately discontinued”. You won’t watch his skilled craftsmen spinning silver on a wooden lathe, though. He regards them as a rare commodity and takes precautions against losing them, concealing them, as he explains, “in our workshop away from the Khan, in the Cairene district of Ghamra. After all, a competitor could come in and lure them away”.

Saad’s advice on the best way to polish silver is a combination of “soap, warm water and a toothbrush — forget all the polishes promoted on the market; they just aim at making money . . .”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

So where does this story suddenly come from? It started on LindiLou’s rose farm this weekend. She had her big annual Tarr Roses Open Day, selling roses and teas and all sorts on the farm, but especially roses.

Tarr Roses Open Day2.jpg
A previous Tarr Roses Open Day. There’s the old thorn among the roses.

An old Harrismith friend was there and she said Dad had sold her mother his Egyptian (Armenian) coffee cups! This brought back memories of buying them in a market in Cairo 74 years ago!

Now he wants to buy them back from her! He’ll pay ‘any price’ he says.

~~oo0oo~~

Later: Yesterday I heard more from Dad. The lady does not want to sell her coffee set as they were a gift from her late mother, who got them from her late father, who bought them from Dad for two heifers. They thus have sentimental value to her. Dad is indignant: “They have no sentimental value to her, they have sentimental value to ME!” he huffs self-centredly. She had them valued at R3500 each (apparently there are two sets) and Dad says no way he can afford R7000 but its not right! He now wants to ask her to put a note on them: In case of her death they must be sold to one of his three children. None of whom want them!

The kicker: He actually has no recollection of buying four sets. The two he remembers he gave to his daughters Barbara and Sheila, who still have them. He remembers nothing about the sale nor anything about two heifers. The bloody things PROBABLY AREN’T EVEN HIS! The ‘sale’ probably never happened. But he has his piddle in a froth about them.

Bloody hell!

~~oo0oo~~

Sheila tells me what she has is a tea set in a wooden box the old man made for her to display them in. Here it is with ancient pics of Dad and us:

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At an antique fair in Umhlanga years ago she was told by the evaluator that they were not worth very much, as ‘every second soldier brought one home’.

~~oo0oo~~

The thlot pickens. Another of Dad’s stories Sheila remembers from the past, is that he did indeed buy those coffee cups he now can’t remember, but he couldn’t bring them home from Italy, he simply had too much loot to carry. So he gave them to a comrade to bring home for him. Once back in SA he lost touch with the man. He enlisted the help of his brother-in-law Solly Solomon, a colonel in the police, who did find the man, but advised Dad to forget about getting his stuff back. The man was a down-and-out on the bones of his arse, and had long since sold anything he possessed.

~~oo0oo~~

Note: **The official rate at the time though, was £1 = E£0.975 – ‘from 1885 to 1949’ according to my source – so maybe Dad got a special soldier’s rate? Maybe the English pound was strong in wartime? Maybe – *gasp!* – he was mistaken!?

Moral of the story? Try not to be dogmatic about your memory. Take it with a pinch of salt. It flatters to deceive, and it deceives to flatter.

~~oo0oo~~

I want placebos for surgery!

Before any doc gives you a pill he should have tested that pill to make sure A) That it’s not harmful and B) That it actually has benefit.

Right?

Randomised control trials (RCT’s) are done using the poison they want to sell vs a placebo pill to see if the shit they want to sell you actually works and doesn’t kill you. *

SO:

What about surgery?

If a surgeon says “Let me cut you, it will help you. Trust me, I’m a surgeon,” how do you know he’s right? In fact, how does HE know he’s right?

Answer: He doesn’t. At first. Established procedures may have accepted success rates, but new procedures don’t. So traditionally most surgery is done by trial and error. Cut, Oops, Bury. (Note the toe tag on the poor victim in the picture! And you noticed the see no, speak no, hear no masks, right?)

So why don’t surgeons use placebos when testing new procedures?

Cos they can’t? No, they can. Especially nowadays with minimal invasive surgery (aka “keyhole surgery”).

http://jameslindlibrary.org/wp-data/uploads/2017/06/Wartolowska-et-al-2016-BMJ_feasibility-of-surgical-rctsx.pdf

The paper is called:
Feasibility of surgical randomised controlled trials with a placebo arm
 
Conclusions:
This review demonstrated that placebo-
controlled surgical trials are feasible, at least for procedures with a lower level of invasiveness, but also that recruitment is difficult. Many of the presumed challenges to undertaking such trials, for example, funding, anaesthesia or blinding of patients and
assessors, were not reported as obstacles to completion in any of the reviewed trials.
~~oo0oo~~

* Just know that they cheat on these trials. If the pill DOES work the trial gets published 100% of the time. But only 14% of all trials get published. Where the pill DOESN’T work hardly ANY trials get published.

surgery2

~~oo0oo~~

What a Storm!

Left home at 9am and got back at 2pm. Never did get to work.

Sat the whole time in this storm. Thought it was bad till I saw the videos of the worst places! This was mild!

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Meanwhile at the practice, the ladies were having their own good time:

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Bloody Tropical Storm Koos!

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Cleanup day today. Jessie and Tobias came in to help Raksha, Prenisha and Yandisa.

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After we’d mopped we got the pros in – R5000 for the wet vacuum cleaner hire!

Bass Straits and Dire Straits

Early Sunday morning I roust the lil bastids. C’mon, Up! Let’s go. Off to Inanda Dam where they’re going to slay the bass. Tom, Jose & Ryan. 45yrs of trouble on six legs and, according to them, fishermen of note.

We hire two canoes from Msinsi and off they go. “See you in about two hours, Dad!” shouts Tom as they wobble off.

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I chill and watch the terrific birdlife. Wrynecks, woodpeckers, waxbills, prinias, canaries, sunbirds, geese, a fish eagle, herons, neddicky, bush shrikes, etc.

Six hours later a weary and sunburnt crew return. They had flattened the eats and drinks I packed and it’s lucky I did: No fish were harmed in the filming of this movie (none were even disturbed).

Lugging the boats back to the boathouse (with much help from Dad) they unanimously decide they would not be doing the Dusi anytime soon.

Inanda Dam fishing (16)

Dusi – The Dusi Canoe Marathon, 120km 3-day river race from Maritzburg to Durban passes by this point on the Umgeni river.

 

Generations: The (rugby) Legacy

I lost a bet to Tom with the Springboks’ loss to the All Blacks this weekend.

Paying up was painless compared to sitting with him watching the match!

Then Sunday I went to Pietermaritzburg where I got a blow-by-blow “Hoor Weer” of the match from the Ole Man.

Both my deskundiges cannot BELIEVE how the Boks just don’t LISTEN to their simple, foolproof advice! One says they should just play like he played for Westville Boys last year and the other says they should just play like he played for Maritzburg College in 1937.

Fuckit I’m going to heaven I swear. Or at the very least I’ll get a diplomatic posting.

=======ooo000ooo=======

Hoor Weer – Kyk Weer, but aural – a verbal re-run and re-hash

Deskundiges – experts, but more than that

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Mfolosi Aerial Dogfight

It looked like a standoff. At a small pool of water in the dry sandy riverbed of the Black Mfolosi river a male Bateleur and a Tawny Eagle contested the scarce resource. Both stood on the sand at the water’s edge and hunched their shoulders at each other.

I watched a while then scanned all around. Suddenly I heard a cry above me. Two birds circled each other in the air just above our vantage point on a bluff overlooking the river. I looked back at the waterhole. They were gone, this must be them. It was. The eagle was dive-bombing the Bateleur shouting a hoarse kraak kraak. The Bateleur screamed defiantly, dodging the move.

The eagle circled to gain height and folded its wings and took aim again, the agile Bateleur dodging with a sideways roll.

The Bateleur then landed in a tall dead tree while the eagle was climbing again. Soon the Tawny was on his way down again, zooming straight at him and knocking him off his perch. They banked and circled and strained to gain height again, the Bateleur’s wingflaps surprisingly noisy. Once again the Tawny won the climb and launched a dive.

The Bateleur folded his wings and flew away low over the tree tops away from the river.

The Tawny landed back at the pool where it all started, victorious.

High above a white-backed vulture and a Yellow-billed Kite, witnesses to the dogfight, still circled in the thermals.

Wow! Who needs a lion kill?

Oh, Jessica. Yes, dear. I didn’t realise how long we’d been here. We’ll drive now and look for lions, honey.

pics from https://willemkruger.wordpress.com/ and birdguides.com – thank you!

Here’s the spot overlooking the river on a different day:

Grave Problem, DIY Solution

The ole man is thinking burial sites. He has found out it costs around R11 000 to be cremated and he thinks that’s an awful waste of money. Someone also told him you can bury yourself anywhere. Especially in your own backyard, “There’s nothing to stop you”. As a mad-keen DIY guy, he thinks that’s a helluva good idea.

I said “Maybe, but the hard bit will be reaching up and shovelling the soil on top of yourself”.

“YOU can do that” he says.

I said “I don’t think I’d be allowed to. Maybe your friends meant literally YOU can bury yourself in your backyard, but maybe it would be illegal for ME to do it?”

“Oh” – That’s got his active 94yr-old brain thinking. He’s plotting something, you can be sure.

~~~oo0oo~~~~

My Car Is Scotch-Guarded

A special place is Montclair. I’ve been here seventeen years now. Longer than I was downtown, or at Musgrave or Pavilion!

My car guard is 80yrs old, a proud member of the McGregor clan. Knows exactly what the weather is going to do each day and tells me with unerring accuracy. “Sunny tomorrow”. The next day if it’s raining: “I knew it would rain today”. Never wrong. Knowledgeable on birds, too. Two drongos attack a kite, dive-bombing it. “Look, that mother bird is teaching the two young ones to fly”. Had me searching the skies hopefully recently for an albatross that hangs around here. “It just flew over. Yes, an albatross. It’s here all the time,” she says. It would be a lifer for me and it would have all the birders in Durban flocking to the centre if there really was an albatross in Montclair! Of course it could be a wagtail.

The bane of her life is school holidays when the youngsters of Montclair use HER roof to kiss, cuddle, grope and “who knows what else!” She chases them off like they’re alien vagrants. When pressed she will confess she was a handful herself in the old days in Joburg. She worked at the Norwood Pick n Pay and frequented the Braamfontein & Downtown pubs, Wolmarans Street was one I remember her telling me about. Speaks fondly of the Victoria Hotel and the Station Hotel.

If I leave my lights on she marches into the shop: “Where’s your boss?” she’ll bellow. Stentorian, you could call her voice. Demure, not so much. And off she’ll go with my keys to switch them off for me. If I’m around when she returns she’ll deliver a short lecture about the battery. I know it off by heart, of course, but she’ll repeat it. She also gleefully tells us when the lift is working (which is often) to save me the extra twenty metres I would walk to the immobile lift.

Knows all the skinder does Bridget. Which shop got robbed, who did it, what the cops said, her opinion. What the punters at the tote on the roof do and say, whether they have won or lost. How much they drink. Who drinks inside at the bar and who saves money by drinking standing around an open boot with a strong cane and coke mixture in polystyrene cups.

What a centre. Whose car guard comes to fetch them in the shop, pops up a golf umbrella and walks them to their car every time it rains? Mine does.

 

Jazz at Oxbow

Stayed at Oxbow Lodge one cold winter night. Can’t remember if we were childful yet or child-free. The whole lodge is tightly squeezed in a narrow space between the road and the river. Our little rondawel was icy: Concrete walls, thin iron windows with flimsy curtains, a slate floor. The bed looked and felt like an ice cream tub. We fired up the gas heater and went off to find supper.

The bar / dining room / lounge area was big and bleak but warmer than our room. Supper was delicious: a big hot filling stew. Maybe oxbone? With sherry.

Plus we had one more great reason to settle down and stay: Lovely jazz music was playing over the speakers perched on the cornices. After a while I went to enquire at the pub. The lovely lady at reception showed me the CD cover below. We have listened to it ever since. *Click Play* and hear it y’self:

Back in the rondawel it was still cold but Oxbow back then was an oasis in the frigid winter Lesotho highlands. There was nowhere else to go for miles. Anyway, we were young and soon heated up the bed knowhatimean.

The rocky, waterfall-strewn river right outside was frozen solid the next morning, miles of ice and beauty in bright sunshine. Still freezing though.

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These pics are of a more recent, revamped oxbow.

The Photo Archives

I hardly ever carried a camera back when I was beautiful and had just the one chin. “I’m video’ing it in my head” I would say.

Of course now I’m really grateful other people carried cameras and I could get pics from them. Even in the days when you loaded a roll of film in the dark and wound it on by hand frame-by-frame some people carried cameras. I salute them!

And I admit I would grumble when they said “Stand closer together” “Smile” “Hang on! Just one more!”. Of course some people would think they had put in the roll of film when they hadn’t and all our posing (“poeseer!” remember SanMarie the game ranger’s joke?) was in vain. Yes, I’m thinking of you Taylor. He posed us in various ways on a buffalo carcase and when we eagerly asked for the photies weeks later (they’d had to go off “for development” of course) he had to sheepishly admit he hadn’t had a roll of film in his steam-driven camera. Luckily Trish had been there and took this:

 

Anyway, my memory of that moment was much better than his pic would have been: I remember a bloody carcase with glistening red meat still on the bone and lion prints around the sandy scene. We were posing looking over our shoulder, worried the lions might chase us off their prey at any minute. When later we did get a pic from someone better organised than Taylor – Trish – the truth was far more mundane. The photo spoilt a good story! Here we were, not one of us looking over a shoulder:

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Intrepid non-photographer on the left with impressive camera bag, no fillum

So although I do have some slight regrets I still think I was generally more “in the moment” than many camera-occupied companions over the years – and I saw more birds. Anyway, my memories of what happened are usually far better than boring reality. Usually I play the starring role in them.

Once I met Aitch things changed of course and we had a fulltime photographer in the house. The years from 1986 are well documented. Then the kids arrived and the number of pics went through the roof. Thank goodness for digital! Even now when we drive through a game reserve Jess will say “Mom would have said ‘Stop! Go back!’ and you would have to reverse and she’d take a picture of a flower, remember?”

With cameras as ubiquitous as they now are all this smacks of days gone by. I was prompted to write this post when I read this yesterday: ‘If a millennial goes to a beautiful place but doesn’t get a photo, did they ever really go?’…

To end, some advice for Taylor:

Life like Camera.jpg

Here’s a graph showing camera sales in 1000’s since 1933:

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OKay Doctor!

An optometrist friend of mine is a bit scatter-brained at times. He wouldn’t argue with that. He got a phone call once while seeing his last patient of the day. He had fitted him in late and told the staff “You go home, I’ll lock up.”

Halfway through the test the phone rang and he went to the reception desk to answer it. He listened carefully, said “Yes, Yes” and agreed to get home soon.

He then left the office, locked up and went home – a twenty minute drive.

After he’d been home awhile he suddenly remembered!! Omigawd! He leapt into his car and roared back to the practice, unlocked and walked in to where the man was still sitting in the chair.

The poor man was the first to speak: “Doctor, I hope you don’t mind, I moved the machine away from my face a little”.

Ahem, “Not at all” said my man and carried on examining the poor humble guy’s eyes.

Man, was he lucky with WHO it was. He coulda got ROASTED! His staff told the story for years afterwards!

~~oo0oo~~