Bit of a gap there, but I’ve had a busy eleven days. One of the highlights was taking Dot for a birthday night at The Norfolk Mead, a beautiful country hotel at Coltishall. We had the whole place to ourselves apart from the stand-in manager, Linda, and a couple from Blofield Heath who came for a wedding anniversary meal. The setting of the hotel by the river could hardly be improved (give or take the odd mountain), and even in the soggy weather it was idyllic. Good food too.

After we had turned the light out to go to sleep I had this sensation that there was a woman standing in the room – but it was not in the least frightening. Quite the opposite. Probably a dream. I didn’t see anything.

David, Vicky, Oliver and Amy came up for the previous weekend, and we had a relaxing time with them. Again the weather was indifferent, so we stayed indoors mostly. David extricated a lot of stuff from the loft, with the result that Oliver suddenly found himself with a cornucopia of old cars. I now have several bagfuls of old stuff in the garage to sort out. Ho, hum.

Last week, as well as the birthday treat, I was also busy writing my column and writing a piece for the coming Sunday’s Ambient Wonder event. Oh, and and I had to write a sermon, too, and choose hymns. I also assessed one of the trainees at Yarmouth. Happily, the other one postponed again. Then there was the chess match at Wymondham on Friday night, when I manage to score my first win of the new season, though I didn’t play that well. I’m playing again tonight.

Dot is at East Rudham today, in the wilds of mid-Norfolk, shadowing the inspection of a school there. She’d left the house by 7.30am!

Oh, the picture. That’s a rather nice one of my son and his two children at Attenborough – where, coincidentally, he was married. Well, just down the road – not on that particular seat.

No-one I know, but she happened to go and sit on the rocks in Kalk Bay when I wanted to take a picture of the stormy sea; she turned out to be a peaceful counterpoint to it. Atmospheric moment.

Back here in England things have been a bit quiet. Today has been very grey and uninspiring; I ventured out briefly to take prescriptions up to the doctor’s, but it rained on me, so I retreated. I would have been woken at 8.30 by the piano tuner, had I not been awake since about 5am and up watching England drawing 1-1 with Holland without stirring themselves at all.

Later I mapped out the Christmas drama for St Augustine’s, for which I shamelessly plundered the work of previous years. Dot spent much of the day reorganising the house, but I managed to get the DVD player working again.

Incidentally, today is exactly a year since I started writing this blog. I’ve written on average more than once every four days, which I suppose isn’t bad, though it isn’t good either.

My grand-daughter Amy, who is due to start in the nursery section of her new school after Christmas and seems a bit bemused by the whole thing.

At the other extreme, I did a bit more ancestor-digging this morning and made a couple of discoveries. My great grandfather, Henry Lenton, is recorded in the 1851 census as being 13 and living with his father and mother – William and Sarah Lenton – at Yaxley, near Peterborough. William’s age is given as 51 and his wife’s 50, which is strange considering that they have children of 16, 13, 9, 6 and 4. The 16-year-old is a daughter, Harriette, and the other three are also girls: Lucy, Emma and Eliza. Charles’s place of birth is given as Folksworth, which is just down the road from Yaxley, and I understand that there is a Lenton in the graveyard there. Must have a look. Sarah is from Peterborough.

I also made a discovery on my mother’s side, where I hadn’t really looked before, because her maiden name, Brown, is so common that I thought it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, especially as I know so little about them. Nevertheless I think I have tracked down my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, who look as if they come from Milton, in Cambridgeshire. They are Charles Brown, who was head gardener at Hall Lodge and was born in Brighton, and Eleanor, who was born in Sawston, Cambridgeshire. He was 58 in 1901, and she was 60. Other than my grandfather Frederick William, who was 22 at the time and nursery under-gardener, there were Albert George, 22, also an under-gardener, and Eleanor Jane, 31, (a dressmaker) also living at Hall Lodge.

Yesterday I went on a yomp with former EDP colleagues Robin, Brian and Ralph. It was supposed to be a five-miler around the Waveney valley near Syleham, but it turned out to be nearer 7 (6.79 according to my pedometer) after we went wrong a few times. The weather was quite mild, apart from a cooler patch of light rain in the middle. We met Bruce for a drink at Brockdish afterwards.

This is the rhino that almost charged us in South Africa. He is not part of my immediate family or an ancestor, but I thought he deserved a mention for doing the decent thing and letting us survive.

Walked into Norwich this morning to change 400 Rand back into sterling: just over £26! I shall try not to spend it all in riotous living.

SAFARI

At the angle between
rhino and my oh so fragile body
crouches the ranger

He makes strange noises
motions me to place a thin tree
between myself and the
unaccommodating beast, then

gestures, like Gandalf
with snake stick, wand, light sabre

holds firm, speaks
rhino language

The beast listens,
its tiny eyes fixed,
considering its options, then

with its eloquent foot
stirs up the dust
from which we are made

feels it has made
its point

This is me with my aunt Vi – my mother’s sister – at Sandy and Alex’s house in Table Bay, Cape Town. Meeting her again after many years was uncannily like meeting my mother again. She had grown more like her over the years. We spent an evening with her and then shared a meal at the Blue Peter hotel, where they were staying at Blouberg, on Table Bay.

Today I’ve written a few poems, based on our African experiences and mostly started when we were there. I’m not sure they’re all finished, but I quite like parts of them. Earlier I went to Yarmouth to assess one of the EDP trainees. Sunny but very cold: I felt as if my entire body was about two inches thick. It would be nice to get rid of the catarrh and feel a bit more resilient. On the plus side (I think) I have lost a bit of weight. I don’t know why.

Sandy again, this time with her husband Alex, plus Dot and me, close to sunset at a hotel on the edge of Table Bay. Wonderful light, but a chilly wind, and we eventually drove to an indoor Fishmarket restaurant for a delicious meal with a good view of a sushi bar. I know understand more about how sushi works without actually having to taste it, which has to be good.

This is an example of one of the may good things about Cape Town. If I could be transported magically, I would go there often, despite the threat to personal security as evidenced by high walls, electric fencing, barbed wire and threat of armed response. The only time I really felt threatened was when we took a wrong turning and walked by Cape Town rail station around 6.30pm. A couple of guys (or maybe the same one) grabbed my arm and Dot’s, but another one stopped him and we hastened on. A definite feeling of being outnumbered and in the minority.

Apart from this, I didn’t really feel threatened, even when we went to the township of Guguletu in the middle of a taxi drivers’ strike, which had led to some violence and a strong police presence. One vehicle was stoned and then destroyed, some roads in town were blocked and there was definitely more violence in the air, because schools were being sent home early. We were driven to the J L Zwane church and community centre, which has a huge reputation for good, and spoke to the church leader, Spiwo, and to one of the education ministers for the province. We then went by car (taxi-shaped vehicle too provocative!) to a Roman Catholic school and spoke to the head teacher.

The poverty of the townships was unmistakeable, but in normal circumstances the mood was upbeat, if fatalistic (it was quite normal for the township residents to stroll across motorways). I had expected to feel generally much more uneasy in Cape Town than I was, and the black people I spoke too were friendly and helpful. Outside Cape Town centre, in the stunning bays round the peninsula and in the winelands, everything was peaceful.

Highlights of the holiday were many: our first Sunday lunch outdoors at a restaurant on the shores of the Langebaan lagoon; climbing in the rocks at Llandudno Bay, where we first glimpsed whales from the shore; the stunning Chapman’s Peak Drive; sitting on the rocks at Kalk Bay on a stormy day; exploring the unexpectedly lovely Kirstenbosch on a day when the sun suddenly broke through the clouds; reaching the summit of Table Mountain after a two-mile walk from the cable car and breakfast in the restaurant; going as far south as we could at Cape Point after climbing to the top of the Cape of Good Hope (not even the second most southerly point in Africa, but wonderful just the same).

Then there was the stunning scenery of the winelands, especially the beautiful Huguenot village of Franschhoek; the seductive emptiness of Overberg; the magical Waterfront in Cape Town; white-sanded and rocky Blouberg beach, with its beautiful view across to Table Mountain; two mouth-watering mountain passes; and of course the totally new experience of a walking safari, during which we came within a few yards of a white rhino, which had to be dissuaded from charging us by the ranger “talking” to it – and during which also Dot ate a termite.

We had a tremendous opportunity to talk to local people at a party hosted by Sandy and Alex – both of whom were culinary experts – and the totally different experience of staying at the Vineyard Hotel, with its fascinating history, its colonial feel in the middle of a very English Newlands district – home of test cricket and rugby, and of a few people who seemed to be still living in the past.

There were a couple of brushes with disaster while I was driving. On the first occasion we were travelling down Tafelberg Road below Table Mountain when a car came round the corner on the wrong side of the road. We were both doing about 35mph, and he showed no sign of getting back to his own side, so I swerved round him, to the accompaniment of the odd scream from the back. No idea what he was up to, but it was quite a shocking experience. The second episode was one only I noticed: we were driving down towards Hout Bay when a couple of young boys pushed a truck out across the road; nothing inherently dangerous in that, but I noticed that only one of them had run back to safety. The other was hidden by the truck, but I suspected he might also run back across the road – which he did. Happily, I had slowed down in anticipation.

This is my cousin Sandy, who was kind enough to look after us for much our time in South Africa. Her mother, Vi, is my mother’s younger sister and is still alive and thriving in the southern hemisphere. I could hardly believe as we stood on the Cape of Good Hope that most of Australia was north of us, in a lateral sort of way. In fact we were only about 4000 miles from the South Pole.

Which explained the penguins. They inhabited their own little beach close to Simonstown, on the shores of False Bay – still less than an hour from the centre of Cape Town, where we were staying. They’re called Jackass or African penguins, and they don’t seem concerned by the lack of icebergs.

While the journey to and from Cape Town was tiresome and tiring, the scenery once we were there was spectacular. Mountains out of Lord of the Rings, sea in technicolour. Of course there was the poverty of the townships too, and the uneasiness of living in not one but several strange cultures.