A Memory

I still have memory flashes, moments when a scene from my past suddenly explodes into my consciousness, like a great rocket illuminating the dark ramblings of my mind. I have fewer, which is a shame as these pictures are of special places, so I try to hold on to them as they fade, then perhaps spend a few minutes hunting to see if I have any photographs of the place that might help recall that moment.

Sandwich Bay is one such place. Our visit was on one of those expeditions upon which tourists are encouraged to go so they can say they have seen true desert, but an unusual desert in that it runs right down to the sea; and the more unusual because, in places, a high proportion of its sand grains....

....are pink and brown, not quartz as in ordinary deserts but garnets. These grains are, perhaps, a clue to why, mostly now buried beneath the sand....

....a few buildings stand rotting slowly, mummified by the heat, for garnets are associated with a particular suite of minerals, and this is the legendary Skeleton Coast of Namibia along which, in days gone by, it was possible to wander the shore picking up diamonds.

Etendeka Memory

I had another vivid memory picture yesterday, an instantaneous, quickly fading waking dream usually of a place I have loved that hits me at any time and is so real I might be back there. This time it was of the Etendeka conservancy in Namibia's Damaraland. It isn't surprising that I have so many flashes of Etendeka, as its landscape is stunningly beautiful on a spare but epic scale.

We stayed at Etendeka Camp, sleeping in one of these simple but comfortable tents from which the view....

....included a variety of animals grazing close to our front door. Some spent their nights even closer to the tent, I suspect because they believed that predators were unlikely to come too close to human habitation.

The memory flash was of this room, a big open-plan space which included a lounge, dining area and bar. The drinks were included but few stayed up drinking late because....

....the tents were some distance away from the bar and most people didn't have the game's touching faith that, on our way to bed, we wouldn't bump in to a hungry lion or leopard. Worse, one had to leave the tent and, in pitch dark and clutching a small torch, make ones way round to the side of the tent if one needed the toilet during the night.

Memory Flashes

We spent the last night at the end of our 2009 trip to Namibia at a small lodge close to the airport. It was probably the least impressive of the places we'd stayed yet, for reasons unknown, it's been flashing back into my memory over the last few days. I'm reminded of the walk we took on the last afternoon, one during which I took photographs of the African bush, to remind me of its colours, its heat, of the battering shriek of the crickets....

....and of its wildlife - though there was nothing more impressive than the ant hills built by those energetic creatures during the excavations for their nests.

In the late afternoon we sat in the lodge's hide, overlooking a waterhole whose one reward for our patience was a black-backed jackal. However, we were treated to....

....a wonderful farewell African sunset.

The Namibian holiday was our first, very tentative return to Africa following our retreat from Rhodesia in 1970. It made us determined to go back again, which we did in subsequent years, each time to Tanzania. Those holidays provided us with hundreds of photographs which, with time on my hands, I now enjoy going through.

But the memory flashes are different, for with them I am, for a few moments, immersed. I not only see a scene, I hear its sounds, I feel its heat: it is real and, yes, I wish I was back there living that time again.

The Veranda

I was standing looking out of the window at the small birds feeding in a freezing back garden when I had one of those moments when the memory of a place so suddenly and totally possesses me that it is as if I am back there. It was of the main veranda - at right in this picture - of the bungalow we lived in for the three years we were at Bernard Mizeki College in Rhodesia between 1967 and 1970, and I was standing where, in the photo, Mrs MW can be seen sitting under the passion fruit vine.

It was a lovely, deeply shaded veranda which looked out across our garden to one of the kopjes that ringed the college. It was a private place where we could relax during what were often very long and demanding working days and where we were often joined....

....by our dog, Marx, and the two cats, Nhangatanga and Nhata, the cats helping to keep us safe by telling us if a boomslang was in the creeper above our heads. It was also the place where we....

....entertained during the day, in this case two of our colleagues, Pat and Jeff, and their small boys - and, yes, those are my legs in the picture.

It was a happy, peaceful place, a place of rest and contentment, a place to read a good book or to simply daydream and let time pass. That flash of memory did its best to transport me back to the three very happy years we spent in Rhodesia and, in so doing, to remind me of how fortunate I have been in some of the places I have lived.

Another Memory Picture

This place suddenly leapt to mind again this morning, a vivid landscape stripped to the barest essentials of sand and sea and sky, a picture that was so immediate and real I might have been there. I don't understand these memory bursts, these images dug up from a dusty album in my brain and thrown at me for only a moment, like a rocket bursting. Why there? Why then? Why now? It's not for any reason I can find.

As is quite typical, it wasn't a particularly special place to deserve such treatment - we were only there for a few hours as part of an uncomfortable tourist trip - although it was quite unlike anywhere I have been before or since. It was a memorable place, without the baggage of commitment: we saw it, experienced it, photographed it, paid, and moved on: I think it was salt pans and flamingoes next.

The place was Sandwich Harbour on the coast of Namibia to the south of Swakopmund, the time was October 2009; and I wish I could wind back the clock and walk that beach again.

Another Memory Picture

I was standing at the sink this morning doing the washing up and wondering why the small birds seemed to have given up their near-constant competition for the feeders when I had a sudden, very vivid vision of....

....a view not unlike this one except in colour. I have no idea why these memory pictures, as I call them, explode on me, or what triggers them - I had no particular reason to be thinking of our three years at Bernard Mizeki College in Rhodesia all those fifty or more years ago. It's as if my brain suddenly generates a random number and then sends some electrical pulses off to collect whatever memory is in that box, and then slams it in to my consciousness.

The picture is always still, in colour, very sudden, very real, followed by a slow fading. I don't mind them, which is just as well as they are becoming more frequent, though they leave me feeling a little upset because what lingers is a wish that I could wind the clock back to those days and because - and this is another feature - they are almost always of a place where I was very happy.

Occasionally the picture is a reaction to something I'm looking at, a bird or a shell on a beach, a skyscape, a flower, and the memory is usually of something similar but better, like a much bigger or more exotic bird.

Maybe the memory pictures happen because my mind isn't as busy as it used to be and, therefore, has more scope for doing what it wants: and cheering me with recollections of past happiness can't do any harm except.... I so wish I could live those experiences all over again.

A Mikumi Memory

 I haven't written about them in some time but the memory flashes that I've had for years are becoming more frequent. A picture suddenly jumps into my mind, interrupting and often totally unrelated to whatever I am doing: like, yesterday, standing in the utility room, a moment in Mikumi National Park utterly possessed me; lingered briefly; then faded, leaving the ghost of a memory.

I was standing in the back of a Land Rover next to Mrs MW as we were driven down a rutted track from the park gate to....

....the lodge where we were staying. It was built on a low hill with the dining area at the summit and the tents - each covered by a straw roof - arranged so they gave a views of the water hole where many animals, including....

....lion, came to drink.

Mikumi is one of Tanzania's newer game parks having been established in 1964. We had been warned not to expect too much, and that, because it was close to Dar-es-Salaam, it could become crowded but we had no complaint....

....seeing plenty of game - though we noticed that none of the elephant carried any weight of ivory, the result of years of poaching.

In any case we were never the twitcher sort of tourist who has a list of what he needs see. There is as much pleasure to be had from watching a majestic giraffe standing in the heat of the day under the shade of an acacia as there is in watching....

....the seething mass of a safari ant column moving through the dry dirt intent on mischief.

I am grateful to my brain for carrying round all these picture memories, and for the frequent surprises I have on seeing them; and after each event I feel so thankful that I experienced the moments that made them, often many years ago.

Vultures

The skeletal branches of a dead tree along the links at Littleferry brought a vivid memory flash of a hot day at Saadani when we found....

....two vultures sitting in a similar tree surveying the scene. What I loved about this photograph was the intruder, a swift, very possibly a British swift since the BTO has tracked swifts to Tanzania - see their website here.

Vultures spend much of their day high above the land looking for death on the ground. Once a kill is located, they start to descend.  As others join them, a great column of vultures forms as they spiral down to perch in a tree or other such vantage point. These ones at Lake Manze had come down to watch a small pride of lions which, at the time, hadn't made a kill and didn't look as if they had the energy to get up and provide the vultures with a meal.

Vultures aren't beautiful birds, and their table manners are little short of disgusting, but they play an important role in keeping the land clear of rotting carrion and spreading the goodness that is in a kill across the countryside. Sadly, in Tanzania as elsewhere, they're having a bad time. As scavengers, their main threat is poisoning, accidentally from pesticides, indirectly from veterinary use and through its illegal use in killing livestock predators.  They may also be deliberately targeted by poachers who wish to avoid the circling column of vultures which indicate, from afar, the location of a recently killed animal.

"I Remember...."

My memory isn't improving with age so I always feel good when I can start a sentence, "I remember...."

In this case it is no less than two "I remembers....", memories which refer to small birds we encountered on our walk yesterday, and what is unusual about them is that I can vividly remember the first time I saw a member of each species.

The first bullfinch I ever saw was in a field below our house in Maldon, on one of the bird-watching expeditions my son and I made together on Sunday mornings while his two older sisters were in church, singing in the choir. I recall being as stunned by its colour then as I still am now.

The other bird is a whitethroat, a warbler which doesn't have a very beautiful song but makes up for it by finding a prominent position and then singing at full volume. The first one I saw was above the vegetable garden at Matenderere, our house in Kilchoan, and I recall dashing back into the house to get my camera. The whitethroat very kindly obliged by continuing to sing as I took its picture.

They may be small and insignificant but I treasure memories like these.

Long Bay Recalled

Sometimes a memory hits me so hard it overwhelms me, as happened this morning when we were walking along the coast track beyond Dunrobin Castle and looked along this bay. We've walked this way many times before and those occasions triggered nothing, but today there was a strong onshore breeze bringing breakers tumbling onto the beach, the sky was startling blue, and I remembered....

....this place, a bay along the much less frequented east coast of Jamaica, where we stopped the car just before we arrived at a lovely beachfront hotel called Long Bay. I think I took this picture the first time we went there but we returned as often as we could.

I'm not sure whether it is that I have this faded picture that the memory of the place and the moment is so vivid, or whether I would have remembered it anyway, but for a few seconds I was back there.

Link to earlier post about Long Bay here.

The Mica Mine

I don't know what prompted one of those occasional memory pictures this morning as I approached the dentist's surgery, nor why the subject should have been in the Namib desert near Windhoek, but it was exceptionally sudden and vivid.

We had booked a tour with a local company but, since we were the only people to turn up, our guide, Ernst, asked us what we would like to do. I indicated an interest in geology so he drove us east to a big uranium mine which declined to take us on a tour so, instead, Ernst headed into the desert where....

....he knew of a very different mine.

This is a mica mine, mica being a mineral whose atomic structure causes the crystals to cleave into thin, pliable sheets. Mica has many uses, particularly as a thermal and electrical insulator, but in the old days....

....it was used to form the windows in furnaces, for which this deposit, with 'books' of mica over 300mm wide, would have been ideal.

All the indications were that this mine had been long abandoned - certainly Ernst didn't know much about it - which left us wondering who had travelled out into this unforgiving environment to work in broiling temperatures to win this mineral.

Memory Pictures

I never thought about other people having what I call 'memory pictures' - that is, when "Random memories pop spontaneously into my mind" - yet this is the title of an article in New Scientist of 27th October 2018.

Apparently, "these involuntary recalls happen to all of us, on average about 20 times a day, although there is a lot of variation between individuals," with older people tending to experience more.

The vivid, almost explosive pictures which I see are infrequent, happening on average perhaps once a week at most, so is New Scientist describing something slightly different? My mind, as the title of this blog suggests, does ramble back over the past but these memories aren't sudden, not like the memory pictures.

New Scientist gives them a name, 'mind pops'.

A Jamaican Bar

I had one of those sudden memory pictures today - no rhyme or reason, just a picture in my mind of a bar beside a beach in Jamaica the last time we were there, in 2010. As it happens, I took a number of photos at Jack Spratt's that late afternoon, pictures I haven't looked at in years and never got round to editing.

I don't remember anything of the conversation, nor of the drinks, nor of the bar or the people around us but I do remember that we arrived long before things hotted up to Jack Spratt's reputational level - which, if Jack Spratt's was anything like any other bar in Jamaica, probably didn't happen until the early hours. So we sat and talked and watched the sea while....

....the afternoon shadows lengthened and the sky's daytime dirty blue turned into the muddy orange of evening.

This picture is as close as I can get to the one that interrupted my mind this afternoon, not much except a sea and a cliff line with the southeaster blowing a mist of spray across the land until....

....as the sun sank into the Caribbean away to the west, the wind eased, as it does as evening comes on.

At which point sundry Jamaicans suddenly felt the urge to get up and go down to the beach, to stand in small, silent-talking groups or wander the sands.

Soon after sunset we left. Nothing of any great event that I can recall happened that afternoon except that a picture must have stuck somewhere in my brain to resurrect itself for no reason on a damp English day some eight years later.

Death in the Desert

One of the maths teachers at my prep school, Glengorse, had a badly scarred face. Being small boys, it intrigued us, the more so when we discovered that he had almost died in the Western Desert when his tank had been hit and 'brewed up', a horrid term which means that the tank had caught fire.

He wasn't the only teacher to have fought in the war: the headmaster had been in De Havilland Mosquitos, the history teacher in corvettes. Such information was useful in assisting us to persuade a teacher to follow a 'red herring' - that is, to talk about things which were nothing to do with the subject but, usually, far more interesting. It turned out that the maths teacher was only too happy to oblige.

One day he described ambushing German convoys. The British tanks would wait 'hull down' behind the crest of a dune and then charge down the steep slope, enabling them to get close before the Germans could retaliate with their very effective 88-millimetre anti-tank guns.

Years later, in 1963, sitting in a cafe in Tobruk while hitch-hiking back from Egypt, Michael Atkinson and I met the chaplain of the nearby British RAF air base at El Adem. He told us that the bedouin occasionally came in to report human remains they had found out in the desert, some of them British, and some still sitting in their tanks. He would then go out and collect and, if they were British, inter them in the big Commonwealth war cemetery outside Tobruk. When we asked him why it had taken twenty or more years to find them he described the math teacher's tank ambush manoeuvre and how, once brewed up, the tank would be steadily overwhelmed by the moving dune, only to appear, years later, on the upwind side, with the desiccated bodies of the crew perfectly preserved inside.

That evening, a few miles west of Tobruk, after a day of frustratingly short lifts which had left us stuck out in the desert, we had laid out our sleeping bags by the side of the road when we heard a truck approaching. We rushed out and flagged it down. It was a British one-and-a-half tonner. The driver said he was quite happy to give us a lift to Benghazi but we'd have to travel in the back. Fine, we said. OK, he replied, but there's a body in there, in a coffin. We climbed in and rolled our sleeping bags out again, this time on either side of an RAF officer who had drowned that afternoon in an accident while snorkelling.

I tell this story because the incident in Tobruk came to mind this afternoon when I had one of my sudden picture memories, of one of those desert cemeteries, high-walled to keep out the sand.

Picture of Tobruk Commonwealth cemetery courtesy

Maher A. A. Abdussalam on Wikimedia Commons.

The Waterhole

Waterholes, particularly in the dry season, are fine places at which to spend time watching Africa's wild animals go about their daily business. This particular waterhole is in Mikumi National Park, a park which, from the wide range of animals we saw in it, was under-rated.

This mixed herd of zebra and wildebeest seemed to be milling around rather aimlessly until both they and we became aware that...

....they were being watched.

African Bush Pig

Just at the back of the buildings that comprise Saadani Safari Lodge on the coast of Tanzania there's a 'hide', which consists of a roofed platform raised on stilts with seating accommodation. It overlooks a small waterhole, very inviting to wild animals especially in the dry season, yet most of Saadani's visitors don't seemed prepared to sit and wait to see what turns up, preferring the morning or evening game drives in a Land Rover, looking for something exciting.

In fact, plenty of very exciting things come to the waterhole and can be seen at very close quarters, if one is prepared to sit and be patient. One of the more frequent visitors are warthog, usually in small families and occasionally as lone individuals, like this male.

In the heat of one afternoon during our 2012 visit to Tanzania, what looked like a warthog crossed the clearing, heading for the lodge's kitchen. For a moment it looked like yet another wart hog, but it wasn't. In all my years of watching African game, this was the first and only time I have seen an African Bush Pig. It went through so quickly I only snatched a photograph.

I did wonder whether it had friends in the kitchen but bush pigs have a nasty reputation and can be very dangerous, unlike warthogs which are often found wandering around villages. They are also usually nocturnal, so this was an unusual sighting.

Twisp

It happens very quickly and very suddenly, a flash of memory usually of a place - and for no particular reason. Sometimes I have a photo which helps recall the memory, sometimes I have nothing or, as in this case, I took a picture a few minutes before.

This is a pull-in off US Route 97, somewhere near Okanogan in Washington State, in October 2008, when we were driving from Edmonton, Alberta, to Seattle to visit my brother. Gill and I sat on the edge of a pond and ate a light meal while we watched a muskrat going about his business. It was a few minutes in the weeks we spent in Canada and the US yet, somehow, today it jumped back at me.

We spent that night at Twisp, a small town just to the east of the Cascade Range. It seemed to represent everything that was enviable about American life, from the boardwalked stores to the slow-speaking but friendly people who lived....

....in enviable surroundings. It was fall, the aspen trees had turned and begun to shed their leaves, and we walked miles along trails without seeing another soul. We spent the night in a small cabin in a slightly run-down motel before....

....following Route 20 high into the Cascades, each turn of the road revealing a yet more magnificent panorama.

This road closes for much of the winter and we followed it shortly before that happened. The GMC Yukon we had hired was a brute of a car and not one that seemed at all suited to the conditions, yet I enjoyed the challenge of driving that frozen road surface.

Surely it should have been a picture of Twisp or the Cascades which I should have recalled so vividly, not a small roadside pond?