The Restory Retreat Centre

Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?                                                                                                                                        Norman MacCaig English painter, John Constable, did more than looking at clouds. He spent much of his time collecting and classifying them. In a letter written in 1821 he expressed his conviction that clouds carry the mood of a painting, calling it the key note. He would leave his house in the morning with a bundle of papers and his pocket full of brushes and spent hours on t...

The Southern vista from Barrowfield Photo by Hanna Jacobs  I have lived in many places throughout my life. The earliest home I can remember was when I was about four years old and we lived in a tiny hamlet called Mica, where my father took a job as electrician in a vermiculite mine. It was very remote and truly unspoilt. It was glorious for my sister and me but nerve wrecking for my mother. It being very much Africa, there were huge spiders and scorpions and green grasshoppers, not to mention deadly creatures like green mambas and malaria mosquitoes. On weekends my father would take us to the banks of the huge Olifants river and we would watch the hippos lazing in the muddy water. We moved to a bigger mining town when we had to start school and from then on every few years my father would find a different job with better prospects and we would move again. For some of the most memorable places we lived I don't have fond memories of. At one stage, when I was about ten ye...