Memorable moments: Decidedly uncool

When it comes to alcohol, I have always been decidedly uncool.

I grew up in South Africa, where beer isn't just a beverage; it is a sacred cultural institution. It is considered the ultimate man's drink, and sharing your first cold beer with your father as you cross the threshold into young adulthood is practically a mandatory rite of passage.

When my turn came, my dad was genuinely thrilled to initiate his son into the fold and share his love of a good brew.

From the very first sip, however, the experiment was a disaster. I hated it. It was far too bitter, entirely devoid of sweetness, and had no appeal to my palate whatsoever. The only conceivable way I could stomach it was by diluting it heavily with lemonade to turn it into a weak shandy—and even then, I would have dropped it in a heartbeat for a sweet apple cider. My poor dad must have looked at me and wondered what went wrong: his son had arrived at manhood with the drinking preferences of a child in a sweet shop.

A few years later, as a student at the University of Cape Town, I decided to join the university wine club. In truth, my motivations had very little to do with viticulture and everything to do with the strategic opportunity to mingle with tipsy girls.

The wine club, I quickly discovered, operated on a rigid, unspoken caste system of sophistication:

• The Aristocracy: Bold, tannic red wine reigned supreme at the top.
• The Upper Middle Class: Crisp, bone-dry whites occupied the respectable middle tier.
• The Social Pariahs: Sweet white wines languished near the gutter.
• The Sub-Basement: Sticky dessert wines sat at the absolute bottom, viewed as a crime against enology.

Given my relentless sweet tooth, there were no prizes for guessing where my tastes landed. I found red wine far too sour and acidic, and dry white wine was, well, entirely too dry. While the serious connoisseurs swirled their glasses and pontificated on hints of oak and leather, I was happily lingering down in the subterranean dessert-wine section, thoroughly unbothered.

As the years rolled on, I drifted away from alcohol altogether. I simply stopped enjoying the taste, and more than anything, it just made me feel sluggish and tired. So, I packed it in completely.

These days, when I finish a long trail and join my hiking mates at the pub, I don’t order a crisp craft ale or a stout. I walk straight up to the bar and ask for a soda, lime, and bitters.

Naturally, this is considered the height of social heresy. My friends love their beer, and ordering a sparkling cordial in an Australian pub is hardly the blueprint for rugged coolness. In the beginning, there was the inevitable good-natured ribbing, but over time, they’ve come to accept that Graeme simply drinks pink fizzy water.

And really, who cares? One of the greatest dividends of growing older is that you finally become completely comfortable in your own skin. The exhausting urge to posture, to perform masculinity with a pint glass, or to drink something you loathe just to blend into the herd simply evaporates. There is immense freedom in standing at the bar, decidedly uncool, knowing exactly what you like and letting the rest of the world get on with their bitter beer. 

Memorable moments: The gravel path

During my final year of school, I was right in the thick of my rebellious phase. In my eyes, my dad could simply do no right. I found him far too conservative, too quiet, and exasperatingly mild-mannered. I was convinced that other fathers possessed an effortless dynamism that mine somehow lacked.

Then came a trip to the Kruger National Park that shattered my teenage illusions in an instant.

I was invited along by a school friend and his family to stay at a luxurious private reserve on the outskirts of the park. My friend’s father seemed to embody everything I admired at the time: remarkably wealthy, magnetic, outgoing, and brimming with charismatic energy. Compared to Dad's gentle, unassuming presence at home, this man felt larger than life.

One afternoon, my friend and I set out on foot into the reserve to track some wildlife. Before we left the lodge, his father handed him his expensive camera.

"Be careful with it," he warned, his tone firm.

Half an hour into our walk, our patience paid off: a magnificent eland appeared through the bush. My friend raised the camera to line up a shot, fumbled with the strap, and the camera slipped from his fingers, crashing hard onto the rocky dirt. When he picked it up, there was a visible, undeniable dent in the casing.

The colour instantly drained from his face. A wave panic took hold of him. He wasn't just disappointed; he was terrified of what would happen when we returned to camp.

"How on earth am I going to explain this so he won't be furious with me?" he muttered, pacing back and forth in sheer distress. "I’ll tell him I took a bad fall. I have to make him believe me."

Then, right before my eyes, he did something that chilled me to the bone.

He dropped to his knees on the gravel track, reached down, and forcefully raked his bare leg across the jagged stones, scraping away layers of skin until a raw, bloody graze opened up across his shin.

Oh my God, I thought, standing there in stunned disbelief.

As I stared at the blood on the gravel, a profound realization hit me with the force of a sledgehammer. If I had dropped my own father’s beloved camera, Dad might have sighed, felt a little disappointed, and maybe reminded me to use the strap next time. But never in a million lifetimes would I have felt the need to mutilate my own flesh just to shield myself from his temper.

In that single, shocking moment on a bush track, the scales fell completely from my eyes. The charisma and swagger I had so admired in other men suddenly looked hollow, while my father’s quiet, mild-mannered gentleness revealed itself for what it truly was: a rare and magnificent gift.

Standing beneath the Kruger sky, nursing another boy’s self-inflicted wound, the foolishness of my rebellion washed away, replaced by an overwhelming, permanent gratitude for the gentle man waiting for me at home.

Cumberland Forest cafe and nursery with Xenia

It was a beautiful summers day so we decided to venture further afield for our Fri lunch get together.  We also went for a lovely stroll in the forest afterwards. 

Anusha and Ashesh get remarried on their 10th wedding anniversary

Anusha and Ashes, our beautiful Nepalese friends, got married 10 years ago, but by Nepalese standards, it was a very small wedding. They decided to get remarried and do it properly this time to affirm their commitment and celebrate their love with family and all their Australian friends who they've met since moving here. 

I ended up being neither celebrant or official photographer so I was able to completely relax and enjoy it. They got married at 8.30 am on Sunday morning and their reception wasn't till 5.30 pm so I was able to go home and have a nap in between. I had woken up very early in the morning to help Shushann with her conscious aging presentation.

At the reception, there was a wonderful array of performances to watch. Ashesh has a love of magic, so they had a fabulous magician do a show. The highlight was when he filled a paper cup with water and then asked Anusha to pour it over her head. Of course, the water had magically disappeared, but there was a little bit of suspense. If the magician had got his trick mixed up, Anusha's beautifully done hair would have been horribly ruined!

Lots of Anusha and Ashesh's friends's did songs and synchronised dances. There were also lots of heartfelt speeches, some of which brought tears to my eyes. Anusha did a lovely song and she and Ashesh did a beautiful dance. Of course, Gavin was the MC (who else!) and he always makes it fun despite the 45 logistical announcements he had to make and the fact he had just returned from a gruelling trip to Saudi Arabia.  

Jack was there with his lovely wife, Tess, who I have never met and they brought their gorgeous new baby who did not cry once despite some very loud singing and antics.

All in all, a beautiful day of love and celebration.

Ashesh, the groom

Krishna, the head groomsman

All the groomsmen. I wonder what the collective noun would be 😅

The beautiful bride arrives with her parents out from Nepal

How cute was this little page boy

The flower girl, also so cute

The bridesmaids

Saying their vows

The celebrant had done over 500 weddings and he was great

The wonderful climactic clinch!!

Signing the register

For once, the Hot Lunch Bushbashers were not in hiking clothes!

Tanya in beautiful attire, as always

At the reception

Ashesh takes part in the magic show

Rajesh, not surprisingly, was late to the wedding but, surprisingly, was on time to the reception!

Lovely to meet Tess, Jack's lovely wife

Jack's beautiful new baby

Helping Shushann with her "Dangerous Old Woman" presentation

It's a really powerful, fun theme, part of Shushann's focus on conscious aging. She did a wonderful job with it. I helped her add a bit of structure and give it good flow.  She will present it in a few days and hopefully there will be some new sign ups for her workshop starting soon.

Memorable moments: Dad's bed bug fiction

Dad and I shared a deep love for the open road. In my late teens, we set off on some unforgettable road trips together—meandering along the Garden Route to Knysna, winding through the sheer rock gorges of the Swartberg Pass, and journeying north into the game reserves of Zululand.

Those long drives were a golden chapter for father-and-son bonding, set to an eccentric soundtrack. We blasted the Hooked on Classics orchestral disco hits on repeat, followed by rousing renditions of Pomp and Circumstance. Dad had his heavy video camera primed on the dashboard to record the scenery, while I was glued to the window with my binoculars, thoroughly obsessed with my new passion for birding.

Yet for all that warmth, I held onto one affectionate grievance from those travels.

During an overnight stay in Knysna, I pulled back my bed covers and discovered a massive, dead insect lying flat on the sheet. Growing up in Cape Town, where cockroaches weren't an everyday household fixture, I didn't recognize it.

"Dad, what on earth is this?" I asked, pointing at the carcass.

Dad leaned over, inspected the beast, and looked at me with an unmistakable glint in his eye.

"Oh, that’s a bed bug," he said casually. "Don't worry, that one's dead. But you'd better watch out—they usually travel in packs."

I was utterly horrified. I had heard dark tales of blood-sucking parasites, and the terrifying prospect of a pack of these armored, palm-sized mini-monsters lurking in the folds of my duvet waiting to drain my veins kept me awake with my eyes bolted to the ceiling. It wasn't until much later that I learned what a cockroach actually was and realized I’d been royally wound up.

Decades later, I emigrated to Sydney. I quickly discovered that Australian cockroaches were a completely different breed: monstrously large, terrifyingly fast, and endowed with the deeply unsettling ability to fly straight at your head.

But Sydney also had the real thing waiting for me.

Ally and I had rented a lovely flat overlooking the water, with the white sails of the Sydney Opera House visible in the distance. Ally’s sister, Kerry, had stayed with us for several months, occupying our spare room before eventually moving out.

Shortly afterward, my mum and Mike flew in from South Africa for a visit. To accommodate everyone, we handed them our double bed, Ally camped out on a mattress, and I volunteered to take Kerry’s old single bed in the spare room.

The next morning, I woke up in absolute agony, covered from head to toe in furious, itchy red welts.

Mum took one look at my speckled skin and gasped: "Oh no... that looks like bed bugs."

We hauled the mattress up and flipped it over. The underside was an absolute horror show—a writhing colony of bed bugs, completely blackened by thousands of tiny parasites and their accumulated waste. While Dad had joked about a solitary giant in Knysna, here was the literal definition of a pack feasting on me uninterrupted all night long.

The most disturbing revelation was that the infestation hadn't appeared overnight. They had clearly been biting Kerry for months on end, but because her skin simply never developed an allergic reaction to the saliva, she had lived alongside the horde in blissful ignorance.

It took three separate visits from a heavy-duty exterminator with industrial chemicals to finally eradicate them.

Scrubbing the bite marks in the shower, I found myself thinking back to that hotel room in the Western Cape. In hindsight, I almost wished Dad’s Knysna bedtime story had been true—because fighting off a visible, heavy-footed cockroach would have been far easier than waging chemical warfare against an invisible army.

Memorable moments: A high-seas recalculation

In the late 1960s, my mum—a spirited, pretty twenty-year-old English lass—boarded an ocean liner in London bound for Cape Town. She was setting sail for the southern tip of Africa in search of adventure, independence, and the open sea.

Early on during the voyage, she met a chap who seemed to tick every single box. He was handsome, charming, outgoing, and easy to talk to. Mum was thoroughly smitten with him, admiring him from across the deck and happily imagining the possibilities.

Then came the sudden revelation: he was a priest.

Mum was not religious in the slightest. In an instant, every single enthusiastic tick on her mental checklist was unceremoniously wiped clean, replaced by a single, definitive cross. Any budding interest evaporated on the spot.

Sharing a cabin with the priest, however, was a very different kind of man: a balding, slightly built fellow of a far quieter disposition. He didn't command the spotlight, but he had a kind and gentle presence, striking green eyes, and a lovely, warm smile. He had been living and working in London and was on his way back home.

Ah, Mum thought, looking at him with fresh eyes. He’s not bad at all.

His name was Ivor.

Over the remainder of the long voyage across the Atlantic, Mum and Ivor began talking on deck, sharing unhurried conversations, and steadily falling for one another.

By the time the ship dropped anchor in Cape Town, the connection was undeniable. Once ashore, the relationship flourished into marriage, and on their honeymoon, I was conceived.

I’ve always loved reflecting on the razor-thin margins of my own existence. If that charming chap had been a banker or an engineer, my mother might never have glanced twice at the cabin mate. In a very literal sense, I owe my life to a clerical collar.

Memorable moments: The four-person conveyor belt

There are certain family rituals from childhood that carry a special kind of warmth—simple routines that, in retrospect, anchor an entire upbringing.

In our household, dinner itself was rarely a grand conversational affair. We were very much a family that ate from trays balanced on our laps in front of the television, eyes glued to the screen while silence reigned. The real connection, as it turned out, was scheduled for immediately afterward.

Once the credits rolled, the entire family decamped to the kitchen for a communal washing-up session. It was in that small, steamy space that the day was actually unpacked and the real conversations began.

We ran a remarkably intricate, four-person assembly line.

Mum took the helm at the sink, washing each item down in a sink of hot, sudsy water. I stood beside her armed with a tea towel, drying each dripping plate as it emerged from the bubbles. Once dry, I would pass the plate to Dad. Dad would then turn slightly and hand the plate to Jo. And Jo would finally place it onto the shelf in the cupboard.

Dad, quite clearly, had negotiated the easiest job on the planet—a human relay baton whose sole duty was transferring ceramic goods across an eighteen-inch gap of linoleum. But nobody ever resented it. It was never about industrial efficiency; it was about the easy, rhythmic rhythm of all four of us working side-by-side in harmony.

That childhood assembly line left an indelible mark on me. To this day, I have an enduring, genuine love for washing dishes.

Whenever I’m on a weekend getaway with a group of friends, I am always the first to volunteer for sink duty. I love the simple, tactile satisfaction of it—the warmth of the water, the clean scent of the soap, and the quiet joy of watching grease and chaos turn into sparkling order. But more than anything, I love the kitchen companionship: the unhurried, companionable banter between the washer, the drier, and the designated putter-awayer.

Memorable moments: The twinkle behind the camcorder

Every Christmas morning when Jo and I were growing up, our household fell into a rhythm that felt entirely sacred.

Gran and Gramps would arrive, Mum would pull a hot tray of freshly baked mince pies out of the oven, and the entire family would congregate in the lounge to open presents. Christmas carols drifted softly through the room from Dad’s music system.

Then came the inevitable ceremony within the ceremony: Dad would haul out his heavy video camera, rest it against his shoulder, and hit record.

Without fail, Jo and I would immediately groan and protest. "Oh no, Dad! Put it away! It makes us feel so on show!"

Dad wouldn’t say much in return. His eyes would simply twinkle with quiet amusement, and he would keep on filming anyway.

Because he held his ground, everything was captured for posterity. The camera panned steadily around the circle, recording each of us as our turn arrived to unwrap a gift. There were the sentimental treasures, but mostly there were the gloriously eccentric family jokes: Jo presenting Gramps with a hand-knitted willy warmer, or Gramps handing Dad a small parcel with a card that read, "For a man who likes a bit on the side"—which, to everyone’s relief and laughter, turned out to be a jar of English mustard.

Dad has been gone for a long time now, having passed away in 1995. But those tapes - spanning Christmases, family milestones, and road trips to Zululand, the Drakensberg and Swartberg Pass - have become our family's most cherished possessions. Now digitized and lovingly preserved, they are priceless windows into a world of laughter and youth that we can revisit whenever we need to.

As teenagers, Jo and I thought Dad was just being persistently annoying with his gadgets. In reality, it was pure wisdom. Dad understood something fundamental about time that we were far too young to grasp: that the ordinary, slightly embarrassing moments of family life are the very things that become sacred once the people in them are gone. It remains one of the greatest, most enduring legacies he ever gave us.

Memorable moments: The black and white years

In my mid-teens, I went through that familiar, prickly rite of passage: an intense, reflexive rebellion against authority. Whether it was the rigid rules of school or the quiet boundaries set at home, I bristled against all of it.

I directed most of that restless friction toward my dad—something I carry a genuine pang of regret about now. To my teenage eyes, he seemed overly conservative, too measured, too bound by conventional lanes. Naturally, I took it upon myself to act as his permanent ideological opposition. If Dad said something was white, I felt a deep, instinctive duty to argue that it was unequivocally black.

The absurdity of that contrarian streak reached its absolute pinnacle one evening as I was heading out the front door to a party.

Dad looked up, completely pleasant and entirely without agenda, and said, "Bye Graeme, have a good time."

I scowled, gripped the doorknob, and snapped back: "Dad, don't tell me what to do!"

Looking back across the years, Dad was remarkably wise in ways I was far too self-absorbed to appreciate at fifteen. He was gentle and patient, mostly enduring my prickly defiance with the quiet composure he brought to everything else. What stings with hindsight is knowing how brief the runway really was; he would only be with us for another ten or so years. I only wish I’d had the maturity then to cut him some slack, drop the argument, and appreciate him for who he was.

Sandy Bay Cafe and Clontarf Reserve with Xenia

It was a beautiful, sunny day for a lovely outing to Clontarf. I love this beautiful spot. I forgot my swimmers, otherwise I would have had a dip!