Two millimetres above the apex of the tiled roof of my wooden hut a monster BANG! made me jump in my office chair where I was sitting, shortening my life according to longevity influencers. Buh-Liksem! That was LOUD!
It was the second-loudest thunderclap I’ve ever heard, I think. The loudest was in the Drakensberg near The Cavern many moons ago.
Some rain fell, the clouds parted, the sun shone and the birds started back up, saying, like me, What The Hell Was That? Hadedas, Trumpeter Hornbills, Lesser Honeyguide, Darkbacked Weaver, Scarlet-chested Sunbird, White-eyes and an African Green Pigeon:
Next day: An African Harrier Hawk – gymnogene – calling.
~~oo0oo~~
Another loud and close bang was in Hilltop Camp in Hluhluwe Game Reserve back in 2015.
There goes my last Tanza cup. Damn! They’re my best – thin ceramic, lovely to drink from. Were my best. Its a tragic loss – Jimmy Buffet even wrote a song about it:
Actually, my last delicate cashmere china cup lasted longer than I’d have bet. It went everywhere with me on my travels. Here one of them is at home, enjoying the birds, Sambucca the Lab’s company and my Tom-made Breakfast for Dad, which Sambucca can smell. She’s probly thinking ‘unfair!’
Health brekker laid on, Binocs, Birds, Coffee and a Labrador – whattalife!
Go and have a look at them on entoceramics.com – they’re the ones with nguni cattle artwork. We had bowls and plates with insects and sunbirds too. Time took its toll on them. The last cup travelled with me in my bakkie camper after I’d sold my home and lasted well, but I bumped it with my elbow and when it hit the tiled floor – kaput. Oh well, sold my Westville house March 2022 and bought a cottage in Mtunzini May 2025 and the last cup made the full journey.
Check out Tanza’s entoceramics website for the beautiful artwork
I sms’d Jules (she wasn’t wakker genoeg to be on signal.org yet) from my stoep after she had visited me while I was whiling away my last weeks in Westville, waiting for the sale of my home to go through so I could hand over the keys to the new owners, and hit the road in my Ford Ranger. ca.2022. The year. The Ranger is 2008.
Jules! I just saw a kill in my binocs! A flying predator flew low over the water, executed an instant 180°, then a vertical lunge and nabbed its prey, biting its head off. (I imagine that last part, the prey was actually too small to see that kind of detail).
I spose I could have been more succinct: ‘Dragonfly Munches Miggie‘
While he was chewing, another dragonfly challenged him. A brief aerial dogfight ensued, then discretion was judged the better part of valour and they said Wag n Biekie and called a truce. Or maybe the challenge ended once he’d swallowed?
Exciting stuff! I’ve had my exercise for the morning.
I managed to shoot him while he was burping contentedly – his prey show up as even more blurry whitish fuzzballs.
‘Help yourself darling, it’s a free world,’ says the auntie fishing.
I’d asked if my stopping on the causeway would disturb their fishing.
I’m looking for herons and finfoot at a little inlet into the river. As I sit quietly I overhear their talk. ‘I’d even settle for an eel at this stage,’ says one. Ah, nothing’s biting, I gather. Then something I couldn’t catch followed by, ‘Well, there’s an aeroplane that’s flown oversomewhere.’
Ah, time for a dop! It is after all, well after 8am. The sun may still be well under the yardarm, but she’s probably right about that aeroplane . .
Dad, I can’t think what to have for our third supper camping. Don’ wurrie Jess, I’ll do the first night, you just do two suppers. What’ll you do Dad? she asked, maybe regretting opening her mouth. Don’ wurrie Jess, I have a plan.
Her query had reminded me that our cottage came with three stainless steel braais, two built-in, and three braai grids, and two huge bags of charcoal – not your garage forecourt size – and eight plastic-wrapped bags of braaihout. I packed the grid, a bag of braaihout, fahlahter, safety matches, and two T-bones. I was going to become a brauer. How hard could it be?
At Bonamanzi there’s a built-in brick braaiplek, no grid. I go scouting the sixteen sites, only two occupied, and find a grid, collecting twigs as I go. At dusk I set the well-packed pyramid-shaped pyre alight and stand back watching the blaze with satisfaction, marveling at how easy this is and how okes gaan aan about their secret and foolproof ‘methods,’ etc and blah blah. When I have glowing hardehout coals – and admittedly still a bit of flame, I’m hungry so I sandwich the Spar-marinaded vacuum-packed very thinly-sliced bargain T-bones into my nifty snap-shut stainless steel braai grid that came wif the cottage, and plop them on top of the camp grid over the red hot coals. With a bit of flame.
I’m attending them noukeurig when the other camper drives in in the dark and I make the mistake of shouting across my coals, How was your drive? Turns out he thinks he should tell me.
He bustles over and tells me. I didn’t catch his name but if it isn’t Earnest it should be. Great detail about how their drive was not good, no elephant. Then where he’s from and what his 4X4 is and which one he actually wanted to buy (Nissan Pathfinder / Nissan Patrol) and how – exactly how – he built his own camper trailer on his parents farm and what he kitted it out with with his own hands and how although the trailer was old, the wheel bearings were still shiny silver when he took them apart. Also the pros and cons of a gazebo.
I’m shuffling and he’s getting into his stride and I’m polite. A fatal combination, which brings Jess with a torch to say, Dad you’ve burnt the meat!
~~oo0oo~~
braai – barbecue
braaihout – barbecue
braaiplek – barbecue
brauer– barbecue deskundige
deskundige – expert, but only in pyromania
noukeurig – barbecue with focus
gaan aan – barbecue talk
~~oo0oo~~
The campsites here are lovely
Nice winter birdlist in three days:
Yellowthroat Petronia, Purple-banded Sunbird, Emerald spotted wood Dove, Red eyed Dove, Egyptian Goose, Spurwing Goose, Great white Egret, Cattle Egret, Grey Heron, Reed Cormorant, Anhinga/Darter, Greater Honeyguide, Stonechat, Rufous-naped Lark, Orange-breasted Bushshrike, Gorgeous Bushshrike, S Boubou, Chinspot Batis, Puffback, Golden-tailed Woodpecker, S Banded Snake Eagle, Fiery-necked Nightjar, Wood Owl, Fish Eagle, Yellow-breasted Apalis, Crested Guineafowl, Spectacled Weaver, Darkbacked Weaver, Green Woodhoopoe, Yellowthroated Longclaw, Eastern Nicator, Camaroptera, Yellow-bellied Greenbul, Bulbul, Fiscal Shrike, Brown-hooded Kingfisher, Striped Kingfisher, Crowned Lapwing, Spotted Thick-knee, Ashy Flycatcher, Dusky Flycatcher, African Goshawk, S Black Tit, Fork-tailed Drongo, S Black Flycatcher, Black-crowned Tchagra, Pied Crow, Lipstick (don’t call me common) Waxbill, Crested Barbet, Yellow-rumped Tinker, Pied Wagtail, Cape Glossy Starling, Red-breasted Swallow, White Helmet-shrike, Burchell’s Coucal, Crested Francolin, Crowned Hornbill, Hadeda, African Jacana, 59
Often in my young life a bowl of dry crumbly uphuthu would arrive ready to eat, absolutely delicious with milk and sugar which I’d add all by my own self. Yum. Then the bowl would disappear never to be seen again until it was back sparkling clean on another day, filled with phuthu. Like magic. Made by Selina, mostly, who might also make egg, toast and bacon on a flat plate. I was pleasantly spoilt and didn’t know how things worked. Just that they did.
Recently we bought a 1kg packet of Nyala mealie meal from Mtunzini Spar and I’ve been successfully making iphalishi, slap pap, soft maize meal porridge to rave reviews from Jessie. Today I thought How Hard Can It Be? I’m going to make phuthu. Oh boy.
I make my phalishi in a glass bowl in the microwave but for some reason I think phuthu has to be made in a stainless steel pot with steel handles on a gas hob. Ouch, bliksem those handles get hot. So add the meal to the water that burnt me, add more meal, steam up the spectacles, stir occasionally, whoa! a lump has flown overboard and plopped down between the stove and the cupboard. Now I have to grovel and stretch in the tight space to get it out with my bum in the air cos I told Jess we mustn’t leave any crumbs for ants or cockroaches or mice. We found some mouse poo when we moved in and I was telling her that’s what brings certain snakes – the smell of rodents. Sometimes I should just shurrup.
To stir occasionally I have to hold the lid with a double-folded dishcloth and also the pot handle with the same hand while I’m stirring with the other hand so it doesn’t slide around. What’s that smell and why is Jessie laughing? Oh, the dishcloth got into the flame and is burning quite nicely. Damn.
Check the recipe on the Nyala pack: Stir occasionally, cook for 35 to 45 minutes. 35 to 45 minutes! Are they mad? I don’t do anything for 35mins non-stop. On average I do 35 unproductive things in 35 minutes.
Eventually its done and it tastes quite nice although its stickier, not dry and crumbly as I remember it and like it best. Once we open doors and windows the burning smell fades but the pot looks terrible, black and crusty, sending Jess off into uncontrolled giggling.
After breakfast Barbara phones and puts Mom on the line. She listens amused then says, Put water in the pot and heat it till the black crust loosens up.
OK, but no more phuthu. Forget it. That’s my breakfast ePiphany. Tomorrow Jess will make egg and toast if she can stop laughing like Audrey Hepburn.
~~oo0oo~~
Rave reviews from Jessie: I freely admit she is generous with her praise and in fact is very disapproving of Gordon Ramsay’s foul-mouthed rants describing food as shit and worse. She says even though at times it’s difficult, you can always find something kind to say about Dad’s cooking.
When I phone at 5:20pm every second night, Mom Mary usually launches into her set routine: “I’m in bed, I’m warm, I’m comfortable, I’ve had my eyedrops, I’m just waiting for my cocktail.” But tonight is different.
She’s not in Azalea, she’s in Arcadia. Her second night in Greytown. “I’m sitting at the dining room table enjoying a delicious soup. The food here is wonderful,” she enthuses. Oh boy, looks like Greytown is going to be a dorp of wild late-night jolling. She may not get to bed before 6pm. She’s loving it. But there is one problem:
“Koosie, the piano here is badly out of tune! It sounds terrible. It sounds alright when Barbara plays it because she really thumps the keys, but when I play it some of the notes don’t make a sound.” Omigoodness Mom, let’s get Professor Bloch to come and choon it, I suggest. She hoses herself. “He’ll have to come down from heaven,” she says. “Did he tune pianos?” she asks. “I think he only tuned violins.” Oh well . .
I try another dodge. Mom! Maybe the reason I only went to one piano lesson in my rugby togs was cos Miss Underwood’s piano was out of tune?! Nooit! She leaps to Miss Underwood’s defence. “Oh no, she would have had her piano fully tuned. And I would have noticed. I had lessons from her for twenty years, from when I was six to when I was sixteen,” she defends stoutly if arithmetically dodgily.
True, I conceded, and you’ve been practicing for eighty years since. “Ooh, I spose that’s right,” she says sounding amazed.
~~oo0oo~~
“You know, when I used to play the piano in the Boksburg-Benoni hospital sometimes some of the nurses would just carry on talking.” Um, right Ma. I mean, NO!?
A few weeks later: “A man came to play the piano for us. He’s very good, some of the best playing I’ve ever heard. He teaches music here in Greytown.” I’m thinking, the piano can’t be too bad then. I ask, What did he play? “Oh, modern stuff. Sinatra, Blue Suede Shoes, I asked him to play What A Wonderful World, and he said, ‘Oh thank you! I love that and I haven’t played it in so long!’ It was beautiful.”
‘Geezer’ refers to an older person, almost always a man, whose behaviour is regarded as either eccentric or typically ‘elderly.’ So what’s that got to do with me, you ask?
Geezers make hilarious comedy. Some well-known American examples of ‘geezers’ are Grampa Simpson of the Simpsons, Grandad Freeman of the Boondocks, Albert in Steptoe & Son, etc.
Geezers are often – wrongly, I now growl defensively – depicted as irritable and cranky, at least mildly irrational, and mired firmly in the past. Hmph!
‘The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it.‘ Grampa Simpson.
‘The best way to describe Grandad Freeman is that he is old yet unwise. He never accepts responsibility for his actions, nor does he learn any lessons’.
More Grampa Simpson:‘Dear Mr. President, there are too many states nowadays. Please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot;’
Grandad Freeman is not exactly the best parental figure or influence (eg. he is perfectly fine with sneaking into movies without paying). He mutters, ‘I hate to see a child go unbeaten.’ To explain his grumpiness, his grandkids sing of him, ‘He’s just mad ’cause his ass is old!’
Albert Steptoe (with a beer on the coffin of his brother): ‘This is the first drink I’ve ever had on him;’ and, ‘Reading books leads to communism.’
– two jebediahs –
The word geezer originally meant a person of any age, the criterion of ‘geezerhood’ being oddness. When it first appeared in the late 1800s, ‘geezer‘ simply meant eccentric in looks and/or behaviour. The root of ‘geezer‘ is ‘disguiser’ – a person who dresses up in costume for a masquerade or other occasion. To call someone a ‘guiser’ (pr. ‘geezer’) was to say that they were dressed and/or behaving as oddly as one might on Halloween, for example. Sometime around the 1920s ‘geezer‘ started to mean an older, eccentric man says The Word Detective.
~~oo0oo~~
My kids mainly call me Daddy or Dad. When they say Da-ad I know they’re going to ask for money. Tom also uses Ballie and Pops. Of my extra daughters, Gugu calls me Pete, and Ziggy calls me Geezer. I cracked up inside when she first said it, but bit my lip. So Ziggy always calls me ‘Geezer’ – and spells it ‘Geyser.’
Last night Ma Mary didn’t have much to tell me. She has been distracted – they’re moving to Greytown soon and that takes up a lot of her thinking. But she did tell me she remembered Fats Waller’s song Alligator Crawl and can still play it.
So tonight I phoned and asked, Do you want to listen to some music? Ooh yes! she was keen, so I played this:
She loved that; she couldn’t remember Aint Misbehavin’ but the music freed her mind; And she was off! We went through four tonsillectomies: Her own as an adult soon after her wedding – she bled a bit afterwards; then Barbara’s – she had to get stitches in Frank Reitz’s surgery as she had a bleed while recovering; Sheila’s – she had to go back into hospital; mine – we went to recover on Kindrochart, no bleeding.
In the Boksburg-Benoni hospital when she was finishing her training her sister in charge said to her, I want you to become a theatre sister. But, Mary says modestly, ‘I don’t think I had the guts for it.’ She rather went and did her midwifery at Addington in Durban. I think assisting births takes lots of guts too!
‘Oh here comes my cocktail,’ ended our call, as it occasionally does.
~~oo0oo~~
Sounds like a fun frailcare, but her cocktail is completely alcohol-free; a mocktail: a painkiller and sleeping tablet, crushed with a pestle in a mortar and mixed with yoghurt, followed by a tiny quarter sandwich, which always ‘Is delicious, even though I’ve already brushed my teeth.’
My cellphone bill ran at R1075 a month. Of course I do have a few hangers-on and their need for data rivals a hummingbird’s need for nectar, but I did keep thinking, Must Ask Karen at Cellucity for a Breakdown of my Bill. And I did. Eventually. After 24 months.
Turns out I have two numbers I have never used that I am faithfully paying for airtime who knows why. Cancel them please, I say. Oh she can’t. What!? Nope, she can SELL me numbers, but she can’t CANCEL numbers. To CANCEL you have to phone 0821958 all by yourself, hold on and press buttons. Yay!
Cebisile is very pleasant, very helpful, very informative – and fiercely resistant to actually cancelling any numbers! ‘NO! Rather do this and that and you’ll still have everything but only be paying R880 a month.’ Long explanation of what a good deal this is and how important ‘her pensioners’ are to her. But I never use the numbers or the airtime. ‘Yes, but NO! Rather keep everything AND get a new tablet and phone, which we’ll courier straight to you, AND I’ll reduce your bill to R640 a month.’ Long explanation of what a good deal this is and how important ‘her pensioners’ are to her.
At this point of a lo-ong call I give in. Here’s what I want to know, I say: I’m paying how much at the moment? R1075. And I will be paying how much from now on? R640. OK, Cebisile, go ahead and do it please. Shit and Bust.
~~oo0oo~~
footnote: The ‘free’ phone and tablet did arrive by courier.
So I sold my forever home and bought a camper. ‘Grey Nomad,’ I thought. Well, I soon found out: A Nomad I Ain’t. Also not grey. It’s gone white. Here’s what’s wrong with being a nomad: Weekends, long weekends and school holidays. Suddenly rocking up without a booking is frowned upon.
So the three years on the road turned out to be around twenty months travelling and the rest comfortably holed up at a special low-low beer-money rental in Broose’s 4-bedroom 3-bathroom beach cottage in the metropolis of Mtwalume, KZN South Coast. The only hard part about loafing on the Souf Cose was that niggling feeling that I really should be looking for a place, a home.
So, in stits and farts, I did. Nottingham Road. Fort Nottingham, Mtwalume, Shelley Beach, Hibberdene, Pennington, I looked; One place in Scottburgh was under R900k for absolutely everything I needed, two bedrooms, big deck, fully furnished, all appliances, aircon, two huge TVs, the works. Owner desperate to join his daughter in England. Pennington got a second and third look – lovely village – but the commitmentphobia held up. After much dodging, I did look at Howick, the Southern Hemisphere’s largest above-ground cemetery. I would definitely not have, but Tabbo made me promise I would, and then he died, meaning I really had to. So I went.
AmberNow, AmberThen, AmberGris 1 through 7, AmberNyet, AmberNever, Eagle something, St Johns the baptist, etc. No. Just NO. Then the town, where a number of grey-haired biddies thought, At Last a Buyer! as I praised their lovely homes and what was great about them. All true, but that did not mean I was about to reduce my savings by two to three million. Sorry. Then I had a clever procrastinating thought: Kick for touch! I asked to rent a place so I could see if I could live in Howick. No problem, I was introduced to a new tannie. She had plenty of places to rent, but ‘the daughter may be a problem,’ she said – Jess was with me by now. Thanks Tannie, You made it easier. Bye, Howick.
On to Mtunzini. Now I got serious. This is a lovely plekkie. Near all the Zolooland reserves, the forests, the coastal resorts. Great birding. Like Pennington, off the main road, so quieter. Better run than the South Coast towns, so this looked right. So I looked at homes. A lot of homes – R2.4m to R3.6m. Oh boy. Well, I’d rent out part of the property to help with an income, right? What am I thinking? Me, the world’s worst landlord.
What I should have done is go back to my checklist: 1. Spend less than the R1.99m I got for my Westville home – a target long abandoned cos of arched eyebrows as estate agents showed me better places in better locations; 2. Be as much off-the-grid as possible; 3. Have good comms – cellphone or fibre; 4. NOT behind a gate of any sort; None of the expensive homes ticked all four.
I’ve an idea Jess! Let’s procrastinate; kick for touch! So we rented a lovely 4-bedroom 3-bathroom wooden cottage at the edge of town bordering the forest for five months. All the while lovely kind Dee, KZN’s most patient estate agent stuck by me, patting me on the head and saying moenie worry nie.
In the end I did what I always do: Ignore the checklist and go cheap, eventually buying a lovely small pozzie on leased land for R1m and I’ll show you the pros and I’ll ignore the cons. It was cheap; It has great solar power – one 6KVA and one 3KVA; It has two water tanks; it’s fully furnished, all appliances, lots of toys; it was cheap; a small garden rigged for automatic micro-irrigation twice a day. All I have to do is rip out the azaleas, columbines, daffodils, daisies and other weeds and plant the right stuff; Also get rid of a mess of flower pots, hanging and earthbound, many garden gnomes and two concrete table and bench sets out of four. And as I mentioned, not expensive.
It is lock-up-and-go. OK, it’s behind a gate in a caravan park, true. I can’t have it all, but I can have savings in my pocket! Two out of four’s not bad. And I don’t have to shop for anything! I hate shopping, and there’s more than enough stuff here for a lifetime. Goodness Ntuli and Strongman have stayed on working one day a week each and have taken a bunch of excess stuff home with them. Willie from Sondela Second hand Stuff Store brought a trailer and carted away two fridges, a deep freeze, a tumble dryer, a bed/couch, sundry other stuff and gave me some cash.
So we’re settling in to our new log cabin and loving it. Jess is thrilled, which helps a lot; the small place has four aircons and nine mounted fans – a clue to what summer will be like in Zululand! Three TVs and a jacuzzi which delighted Jess. One drawback she really didn’t like was the poor comms. FINALLY! she said in desperate relief, when we got fibre. It took ALMOST THREE WEEKS, Dad! We’ve elected not to hook up the satellite dish – it can sommer sit there as a status symbol.
Oh, and Jess got a lovely, relaxed, unfazed welcome.
I thought the bright blue cable running from tree to tree along my back fence was probably the internet fibre cable; Turns out it is indeed, though the local vervets know it as a convenient safe highway well above marauding dogs and hopefully, cruel shooting humans, bastids.
Yesterday the Telkom techie came to connect us. AT LAST! shouted Jessie, the two to three weeks we’ve waited had taken forEVAH! and she nearly died!
So now we’re connected to the world, which is only right for citizens of Mtunzini, as three sea cables land here: SAFE linking South Africa, Mauritius, La Réunion, India and Malaysia, and EASSy, linking Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros, Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa, (both Telkom) and SEACOM, between Eastern and Southern Africa and linking to Europe and Asia (Liquid Telecom Neotel).
“We” spliced the cable, found the tiny thin glass fibre inside all the protective layers, and annealed it with this cool piece of kit. And Voila! we got fibre! OK, so actually Patrick from Telkom did it all.
There’s the router top left in the picture of our lounge/kitchen. We’ve been limping along with 0kb to 4Mb intermittent data rate. Now we have a steady:
Update: Well, not so steady. It’s still Telkom, so we now vary between 0KB and 20MB. They drop the ball quite often, forcing techies out at night and weekends to repair the damage at overtime rates …
Driving back from Kruger Park we were listening to Jessie’s music. She plays a mixed bag including some sixties n seventies favourites of mine. She also plays some Country & Western which is not my best, but Beer Never Broke My Heart is a hoot and always gives us a laugh. Long Leg, High School, Beer Never Broke My Heart I would belt out until I learned it was actually Long neck, ice cold beer never broke my heart!
Then she played a new one and my ears pricked up at the first line:
Six beers, five guys - (A Long Way - by Luke Combs)
Hey Jess, I said, That Reminds Me Of My (slightly misspent) Youth!
Pssst, I don’t really think our youth was misspent. Stephen Fry nails it when he says, Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars. Certainly I got my best education in high school outside the classroom from Steph, Pierre, Larry, Tuffy, Fluffy, Lloyd, Gabba and others; and often after the sun had gone down.
~~oo0oo~~
Jess took the feature pic of the sunset in front of my nose as we drove south through the vrystaat. Visible is the duct tape holding up the window, necessary as the windy-windy mechanism had gone phut. Took a long while, but I eventually found a replacement window mechanism – not easy when its a seventeen yr-old model. Seems they don’t keep all car parts for that long, I dunno why.
I’m now pretty sure I’ve seen Gaboon Adders in the wild. Truth is, I’m more sure Gaboon Adders have seen me in the wild on my hikes in Dukuduku, Cape Vidal and Mtunzini forests over the decades. I just never spotted them, as they’re so incredibly well camouflaged.
Jess and I were invited by Snake Releaser Dean to accompany him to release one he had been called to catch in Mtunzini village. About a metre long and about as thick as my scrawny upper arm, he was a beauty. Beautiful camouflage colouration with a dead forest leaf and shadows motif.
Just look at that pale head, looking just like an autumn leaf.
He moved off after Dean had prodded him out of his usual ‘when in trouble, freeze’ mode. Very soon, he was hard to find . .
Mom told me she has just read* about her namesake and William, joint rulers of England.
William of Holland (Prince of oranges and lemons) and Mary of England were husband and wife and co-monarchs or something. Also cousins. This came about after Mary had got rid of her father as king of England. He was unpopular, see. Can’t have that in a democracy.
My mother Mary then said William wanted to leave England on his ship once upon a time to visit across the channel (to his native Holland I spose, to visit his Ma?) but he couldn’t: There was no wind for his ship. It wasn’t like nowadays when you can just get into a ship and drive off, she says, the wind had to be right. …
As I know little detail about the fakery called monarchy, and less about that little island offshore of France, and even less about sailing, I had to look up some history for once.
Seems there was a husband-and-wife team that ruled the small island, but the William who had no wind might have been another William 800 years earlier, in 1066. So she may have mixed up her Williams. Well, if they’re going to indulge in endless cousin-fuckery and nepotism, they’re going to end up with a slew of Edwards, Charles’ and Williams, aren’t they?
Instead of original names like Cnut. That’s better – and a more accurate description, seems to me.
..
If its accuracy you seek – though I think accuracy in history is a wish more than reality – you’ll get more from wikipedia than you’ll get from me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_II – where my Mother Mary is proved right: There was a time a ship was delayed in its departure “due to bad weather” pertaining to the William in question. The one who was probably actually Willem or Wilhelmus.
