My favourite subject at school, the one I got the highest marks in – Geography. My favourite topic at A’level was physical geography and within that glaciers. Its weird what we get drawn to, I have no notion why, and never reflected on it. I grew up on the Isle of Wight, we had chalk downs, clay and sand…
My favourite city by far, discovered in my twenties, was Edinburgh. I did indeed love the architecture, but maybe it was the huge chunk of granite in the middle under the castle that was weaving the magic.
In 1997 I moved to Filabusi, an hour and half bus journey from Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Every week I went into town to see friends and do my shopping, the journey punctuated by enormous onion shaped bare dwalas of peeling granite. They fascinated me, in fact as my two and half years came to a close it was seeing these for the last time that made me sad to be leaving. The actual bus journeys were fairly horrendous and I Iiterally took my life in my hands each time so I wasn’t sad they were over!
The photo above in shorts and a T shirt was Christmas 1998, I am in Matopos National Park. This was a place that whenever I could, I visited. We did day trips, picnics, walks, stayed in Parks Lodges, drives and safaris in the area which had the white rhinos. The Timberlakes took me off the tourist trail, exploring new dwalas, they taught me about the unique vegetation and vleis. For the Ndebeles it was a place of magic with great symbolic meaning. For the back packers it was the climb up to Rhodes grave, something Nick and I did with friends on our last weekend in Bulawayo in 2010. I have paintings of various views of Matopos, and photos of the cave paintings. It was a wild place I grew to love deeply and missed terribly. The most irritating insect there was the mopane fly, a tiny fly desperate for moisture that hung around your head….very reminicent of a certain Scottish Midges behaviour!
In May 2021 when Nick and I were ‘house hunting’ I walked into Muie Croft house and just said “No” kept walking and repeatedly said “No”. The house was damp, uninspiring, the stairs cramped, the view out the back was of an incredibly steep hill…so “No” not moving here “No” and we left. That evening, I said to Nick that driving to see another house 5 hours away was crazy, I had a feeling that we should go back to ‘Red Flags’ as we had nick named it and explore the actual land, disregarding the property. We got permission from the owners and on our own parked and started to walk up. It was another granite boulder that caught my attention which I sat on for a bit, then we walked on, along one of the granite dry stone walls, called dykes here, and discovered a spring. We turned and stopped underneath a huge granite rock, almost cliff face. I bent down and picked up red deer poo and some hair, I looked at Nick and the grin on my face said it all. By the time we had climbed to the top scaring away a herd of red deer and I looked to the horizon and the sea the decision had been made.
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