Retro-engineering

What does one do when one's family leaves no form of inheritance? Create it oneself, that's what.

As previously mentioned, some of my forebears moved up North from the Pietersburg / Potgietersrus area of South Africa into the new and unnamed country that soon became Rhodesia. That would have been in the late 1800's and doubtless they would have had some fascinating items of furniture, books, firearms and the like that they could leave to their descendants, were they not such schmucks. As fate would have it, all my Dad inherited from his Dad was a hat, a Bible and a belt (the trouser-holding-up kind, not a clip round the ear) and all I inherited from the same source was a rifle for killing elephant. Dad still has his heirlooms, whereas I have long since sold mine to an uncle on the grounds that I am incapable of shooting elephant and anyway as a student at the time needed the money for medicinal purposes (Grahamstown's cold weather being made tolerable by regular tots of sherry).

From my Mom's side of the family I inherited a small sum of money - well old man Girdlestone had 16 grandchildren from his 6 daughters so in retrospect it was a healthy estate he left, just somewhat diluted by numbers of inheritors. Looking at my parents (and long may they continue to prosper) I am likely to inherit nothing, especially not antiques with family connections.

But the Hogga is nothing if not resourceful and so on receipt of my first bonus and sales commission in England - healthy ones too, nearly bankrupting the little mickey mouse company I was working for - I went online to a delightful site called www.yesterdaysdreams.co.za . This is a South African antique dealer located in the little Free State town of Bethlehem (Jesus wasn't born in this one because they couldn't find three Wise Men or a virgin) and it has an absolute treasure trove of stuff. I bought two enormous wardrobes, some cabinets and the like and had them all shipped to England.

These were not random selections, mind you. They all had to be genuine antiques from a particular period in South Africa's history - from approximately 1880 to 1900 - so that they could conceivably have been the ones my family took with them on their long trek North. To complete the illusion I also sought out a whole collection of similar-aged local books, explorer's journals from the late 1800's and so on - and stocked the one cabinet with these.


So now as far as anyone knows I have my great-great-grandmother's bookcase and other items of furniture. The perfect inheritance to one day pass on. Ah, if onl;y I had kids... well heck I can't think of everything!!!

Glory days

Hogga winning Intervarsity Long Jump

OK, a little contrived perhaps, and obviously written to suit this 1982 picture, but still I thought that each life has its golden moments when everything is working in harmony. In martial arts it is known as "flow" and in the three years I studied with Kyoshi Chiba in Zimbabwe I achieved it a couple of times. Like the perfect golf shot in a round of hacking and slicing, it is that few seconds of being in perfect synchrony that brings one back for the next round.

I enjoyed studying martial arts I must say. Not that I was particularly good at it, being constructed more on the lines of a sumo wrestler than of Bruce Lee. Fortunately the style I selected, Shorin Ryu Shorinkan, is a power style with close, compact stances. See more at http://www.shorin-ryu.co.za/nakazato.htm which will give the biography of the Master of the style. A diminutive and wily Oriental by all accounts, yet I have seen a video of him in his seventies sending a fourth-dan Caucasian twice his size flying through the air with a well-executed nudge from his shoulder.

Another way of looking at it is perhaps to think of living in the moment. Not quite carpe diem, because that implies a view that the next day might be your last, but more an absorption in the "now" that transcends all else. It is indeed rare, especially for an easily-distracted type like me, but I remember the nights I worked in the Casualty department of Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo when the flow of bleeding Matabele (they have a merry habit of walloping each other with sticks and stones of a payday evening) was continuous and my suturing work was precise and quick. One time I recall putting in something like 27 hours continuous work and only realising I was tired when I fell over.

In Norwich we have the few remnants of the anchoress cell of Dame Julian of Norwich - http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/julianbio.htm - a genuine English mystic who was confined in a cell (voluntarily of course, that's what being an anchorite or anchoress is all about) adjoining the church of Saint Julian. Hence the name she took. She wrote what is believed to be the first book published by a woman - "Revelations of Divine Love" in around 1393 - and is famous for her devotion, focus and optimisn ("All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well" is one of her sayings).

Now I'm not suggesting that my dear readers wall themselves up in a cell, leaving only a small aperture for the ingress of food and the egress of unmentionable substances, but I do think that we sometimes miss the point of life in our relentless scramble to collect more toys than anyone else. I have been as guilty as any, if not as successful, but I am now wondering how different things might have been if I had collected people rather than things. Invested in relationships instead of property. Not being morbid, folks, just musing a little on how easy it is to pursue the material and neglect all the other components of life.

As Douglas Adams wrote

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979

Ah well, enough introspection for this year. I'm off to the gym and then it's back to the office to earn some more pieces of paper. At least the work is engaging, challenging and complex and that is great for my grasshopper mind. And I have a cunning plan for some community involvement that will allow me to socialise and do real "boy stuff". More later.

Roots - the true version

Missing things African in general and Afrikaans in particular... there is something particularly satisfying about swearing in the language and even in normal conversation it is wonderfully colourful. Which is strange because I grew up in a completely English-speaking household, and at school studied French and Latin. I suppose it is partly the enforced immersion in Afrikaans that results from a couple of years in the military there, and partly because, genetically at least, I am one quarter Afrikaans. My paternal grandmother was baptised Annie Jozina Isabella Swart - and the Swart name arrived in Africa from Germany in the first couple of years of the 18th century.

The other quarters are, as previously mentioned, all English. Norfolk, Yorkshire and Berkshire I think. How strange that I lived a few miles from Windsor for several years and am now less than 30 miles from Kelling in Norfolk, both towns figuring prominently in my ancestry. The Girdlestones, my mom's ancestors, all seem to come from the same small cluster of towns in North Norfolk - Kelling, Holt, Wells next the Sea and so on. I've actually been on a visit to Kelling and seen the gravestones of my forefathers dating back to the 1600's - the oldest one found was one Zurishaddai Girdlestone, Lord of the Manor in those parts and curiously buried some distance from the church itself.
My irreverent speculations about this, and about his Semitic name (Zurishaddai means "Rock of the Lord") were dismissed by Mom - rightly too, as subsequent investigation has pointed out. I am guessing that old Zurishaddai was a Puritan of sorts, perhaps an adherent of the Westminster Confession of 1646 and maybe named because his parents followed an earlier Confession. An unusual name anyway, and one that crops up every few generations in the Girdlestone line.














The church at Kelling is small and simple, around 900 years old I guess , and from around 1780 to 1880 a Girdlestone was the Rector. As Girdlestones held the "Right of Avowson" there in that time, they would have appointed one of their own younger sons as Rector. A strange gap between the last of them in 1881 and my grandad being born on the other side of the country (Formby, near Liverpool) in 1901 - and an even stranger hiatus before he popped up in Rhodesia in the 1920's. There to marry Violet Isabella Cary (daughter of an early Pioneer), become Mayor and Alderman, raise six daughters and eventually be buried in what is now a howling wasteland of vagrants and vandals in Masvingo. Strange how when he died (1978) it was decided by his widow that he should not have a conventional upright gravestone but a flat one so it would not be knocked over by the locals. It remains relatively intact where many of the others in that little cemetery have been smashed. In fact all the Girdlestone graves I have seen have been a single flat slab - perhaps it's the only way to be sure that the irrepressible and larger than life old rascals stay down...

Anyway it's 07h00 and time to get ready for work. Living a mere 15 minute amble from the office is one of the biggest pleasures in being here - and my new house is probably only 5 minutes further out and on the other side of the city centre. The "Golden Triangle" that suburb is called - and once the deal is concluded I'll tell you all. How the Hogga came to be living in a Victorian end-terrace house. Where I plan to store all my books. And how I survived the inevitable DIY work needed to prepare the place after years of being inhabited by a dear old lady and her equally dear (if somewhat incontinent) dog Ruffles.