It is not every day that we are to be found swigging white wine in the cockpit of an ocean-going yacht in Lagos marina but there are exceptions to most things and in this case it was Friday. Which is why the blog is late. And for this you may blame Jawsie, aka Heather Allan, with whom we were catching up after an absence of some 20 years.
Heather’s husband, Maurice, had helped to crew the boat over from the US, via the Azores. And she had flown to meet him from her base in Doha, capital of the tiny Gulf state of Qatar, where she heads up Al Jazeera’s newsgathering operation.
I know that’s a lot of info to throw at a reader early in the day, so let me take it back a step at a time.
Long ago, when the world was young, a number of people were brought together in Johannesburg to launch the SABC’s infant TV News service (for whose subsequent sins we plead innocent, however foolish you may consider us).
The temporary Auckland Park quarters, known as the Blue Building, was where I met both Jones and Heather that first day. I had come from radio, Jonesy from the BBC and Heather straight from Wits. We recall assessing one another and our Afrikaans colleagues curiously, with little notion of what the future held.
1979
Jaws, who has a gift for assigning nicknames, acquired her own from her irrepressible manner - and the eponymous film. Let’s just say that she was never cut out to be a contemplative nun. (After a bout of diarrhoea, I became “Squits B”.)
As time rolled by, Jaws was recruited by NBC to run their southern African bureau and, when I went to London as a correspondent in 1980, she was instrumental in finding Jones a job with the company there.
At some point Jaws went off to run NBC’s Los Angeles bureau and married Maurice, a New Zealander. The years passed and we gradually lost touch with each other as busy people in distant places so often do.
It so happened some time last month that I was about to delete the day’s Gmail spam deliveries when my eye caught the name of Heather Allan. I get frequent email invitations to contact women “who live nearby”, which Gmail in its wisdom dumps straight into the spam tray. And that was where Heather had landed too – and damn near disappeared again.
But I opened the email, discovered that Heather was coming to Portugal to meet Maurice and had been chasing old contacts madly to discover how to get hold of us.
And so things came to pass.
On Friday morning we drove down to Lagos and tracked the yacht to Pier F in the marina.
The yacht, Va Bene, belongs to an American couple, Scott and Annette Culver, who are about to spend six months cruising the Med with their two children before returning home. The children are meanwhile being educated at sea – details of their odyssey may be found at in their blog at culverfamilyadventures.
FROM THE CULVER FAMILY BLOG
When Scott is not sailing the world, we gathered, he’s a tug boat captain and marine instructor. Maurice had trained with him before gaining his own skipper’s ticket. Over a light lunch we learned more about sailing the seven seas than we’d picked up in a lifetime.
Maurice and Heather bade their friends farewell and then followed us back to Espargal to spend a couple of days in our company.
Heather, as mentioned, had been recruited to head up input at Al Jazeera in Doha. Maurice, a cameraman, had decided after a spell there to return to the couple’s home in Long Beach, California, where he tends their motor yacht and skypes daily with his wife. They see each other in person several times a year.
We introduced them to the dogs, the garden, our favourite restaurants, the attractions of Loule and the delights of Algarve country life – all of which seemed to appeal. And we talked a great deal, about the way our paths had deviated and where they were still leading. It proved effortless to pick up where we had left off some time in the 90s.
Our guests had planned to drive up to Lisbon and leave their Spanish hire car there. They took our advice to leave the car in Faro and travel by train instead. After a final cup of coffee at Loule station, we waved them goodbye. As I write, they’ll be arriving at the Lisbon hotel where they’re to spend the night before flying their separate ways in the morning.
What else?
On Thursday we paid our annual visit to the dermatologist who, as ever, zapped us left, right and centre with frozen gas to repair the latest crop of solar keratoses, remarking as she did so how much we had improved. It sure didn’t feel like it. While I am grateful that we have easy access to such simple cryo-surgery, we still sting like mad for a day or two and come up in a botheration of blisters for a week.
For the rest, it’s been the usual stuff – shopping, gardening, walking, watering, widowing – rescuing what we can from Barri’s tireless consumption of household goods. She’s literally chewing the place to pieces.
The heat has eased off slightly. The wind comes and goes. Life continues.
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