Some consider winter the time of death and desolation but I disagree. Winter for me is the incubation, the child in the womb, the seed beneath the soil waiting for the moment to sprout. Autumn, rather, is the time of melancholy and retrospection. Most of the trees here in New York are now bare, but before the leaves fell our friend the Brooklyn-based graphic & web designer Emily E. Owen (website here) caught these photographs of New York in the brilliant crepuscular light. The views are from Fort Tryon Park at the very top of the isle of Manhattan. (more…)

Scotland has been enveloped in snowfall, and the BBC has put a photo gallery up of reader-submitted images of the recent precipitation. The In Pictures feature of BBC News Online’s Scottish section has for years been one of my favourite parts of the website, offering a new series of photographs every week varying from the startling to the quotidian. Above is Michael Rennie’s view of a rather peaceful-looking Loch Ness. (more…)

B.U.R.F.C. 1st XV v. Y.U.R.F.C. 1st XV

I never paid much attention to rugby before I lived in South Africa, where it is inescapable, especially since I was studying at Stellenbosch, which the rugby-est of rugby universities. After becoming a rugby spectator you cannot go back to watching American football, which, with its stopping and starting, suddenly has the feeling of being a demented child’s game. And so, across the Connecticut border to trusty old New Haven, to join some friends and fellow club-members for some Saturday afternoon rugby and revelry, with champagne, whiskey, and home-brewed porter on offer. (more…)

With a bit of time to spare between the rugby match and dinner, we discovered a friend of ours was exploring the newly renovated headquarters of the Yale Daily News and were invited to join in. The handsome gothic structure is now overshadowed by an ugly extension to the previously ugly Yale School of Architecture, widely believed to be the ugliest building in town. Henry Luce paid for the YDN building out of his own pocket in memory of his Yale classmate Briton Hadden, who died just 31 years old. The place went up in 1932 and underwent a multi-million-dollar renovation over the summer, and the place was looking good. (more…)

One of the pleasures of South Africa is that it is so conducive to the leafy things in life. Plants grow most of the year, so even while many of the trees may be bare, there is usually enough greenery about to keep things merry, as supported by the evidence of these shots of the garden of the little place in Stellenbosch where I used to live. Of course, this amenity to growth has its faults as well. Oak trees grow too quickly in this part of the world, leaving their wood too loose and unsuitable for use in barrelling. Wine- and brandy-makers must import their barrels from abroad, adding an irritating expense. Regardless of this incidental deficiency, South Africa still manages to produce some top-notch wines. (more…)

It was just a dot and a name on the map on our way to Wupperthal — Englishman’s Grave, “Hmmm… I wonder what that could be”. The Cederberg mountains have many charms, and of course any one who drinks as much rooibos tea as I must be intrigued to see the only place in the world where it is commercially grown. Leopards, caracals, and bonteboks guard these hills, and of course our friend the dassie (previously seen here) is known to wander around its rocks. (more…)

You drive to the end of the world, turn left, and continue. That’s the way to get to Diaz Point. Namibia’s coastline is supposed to be the least hospitable on the planet, with desert meeting salty ocean with naught in between. Staying the night at Seeheim, an agglomeration of half a dozen houses nearby a stone castle hotel, we woke early and drove the 200+ miles west through the arid rocky desert. The experience is made all the more interesting for the 16,000-square-mile “Restricted Diamond Zone” one drives on the northern periphery of. Namibia’s diamonds are primarily alluvial deposits, meaning they rest on ancient river beds, sitting on the soil or resting just a few feet below. The forbidden territory’s guards are believed to have a policy of shooting first and asking questions later. There are over sixty countries in the world smaller than the Sperregebiet (forbidden area), as the Restricted Diamond Zone is colloquially known.

Eventually — passing through the area inhabited by the wild horses of the Namib, descendants of German cavalry horses and farm animals variously escaped or set free — you arrive at the town of Lüderitz on the Atlantic coast. Besides its German street names (Zeppelinstraße, not to mention Bismarck, Bahnhof, Moltke), the town’s architecture is a curious Teutonic colonial, reinvented for the almost-tropical locale. From one or two of the local businesses, one could easily imagine a slightly overweight German in a linen suit and panama hat, with an eye-patch as well as a cane for his limp, ordering around the natives crudely while engaged in some nefarious criminal enterprise or campaign of sabotage.

But for Diaz Point, you go to Lüderitz, turn left, and go further still. Driving south from the colonial town, you encounter a barren, rocky, and utterly colourless landscape, the grey tones of which immediately bring to mind the surface of the Moon. Am I still on Earth? Only the blue sky and the occasional appearance of vegetation remind you that you’re still on the third planet from the Sun. (more…)

Photo: © Zygmunt von Sikorski-Mazur

TO CLUBLAND, THEN, for a book launch. Of course the secret about book launches is that they are often enough a convenient excuse to assemble a whole troop of interesting characters together, with the introduction of a newly published volume occupying a secondary (while nonetheless prominent) role. In this, our esteemed hosts Stephen Klimczuk and Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie, authors of Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries, exceeded themselves. For me, the evening actually began not in the Travellers but just around the corner in the Carlton Club. Rafe Heydel Mankoo had suggested meeting up there for a drink or two or three before proceeding thencefrom toward the book launch at the Travellers. Pottering over from Victoria, I arrived at the Carlton and was guided towards the members’ bar where I easily found Rafe nursing a drink beside the hearth.

The usual updates were exchanged of various goings-on that had taken place since our last combination in August. Conversation naturally turned to Canada (where Rafe was raised) and shifted to New Zealand just before we greeted the arrival of Guy Stair Sainty. Guy I first met just four years ago while enjoying a pilgrimage to Rome. We happened to stumble upon him in the Piazza San Pietro (as one does with an odd frequency in the Eternal City), and, as it was my birthday, we invited him to join us for some champagne at this little place that overlooks the square. Guy was then in the midst of completing for Burke’s Peerage the massive, two-volume World Orders of Knighthood & Merit, or “WOKM”, which loomed restively on a nearby table as we sipped our drinks in the Morning Room. (more…)

“Chiara,” I asked, “How will you ever know whether your friends are truly your friends or if they really just love your pumpkin risotto?” “You know,” she replied in her thick Italian accent, “this is a serious problem!” The possibility of never cooking pumpkin risotto again was mooted, but wholeheartedly condemned by all in attendance. The very thought was an affront to our salivating taste buds. (more…)

Written and illustrated by Andrew Cusack (at 7 years of age)

Were I to review this book, I would say it is riddled with inaccuracies and depicts a stereotypical Hollywood version of Scotland far-removed from reality. But then, it was written in 1991 by a seven-year-old (yours truly), which is already eighteen years ago now. The ultimate schoolboy error is that I was apparently incapable at age 7 of producing a vexillologically accurate reproduction of the Saltire. My incorrect version of the Scottish appears like the old Greek flag, a white cross extended across a blue field. (See the correct flag here). (more…)

Photograph by Dave Henniker.

Some Selections from the Work of Photographer Bernard Bravenboer

Bernard Bravenboer is a Stellenbosch photographer whose website I stumbled across some time ago. In their vivacity and their variety, Meneer Bravenboer’s photographs capture something elemental about life in the Cape. Here are some selections from his work. (more…)

A reader has pointed out that, in all my posts on South Africa, those who frequent this little corner of the web have not seen so much as a single shot of your humble & obedient scribe in that southerly land. Such lack of photographic evidence, our correspondent argues, could provoke a wealth of conspiracy theories locating me, alternatively, within the deep recesses of the Vatican, training a small fighting force in the Salzkammergut, or, somewhat implausibly, in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

(In truth, I have very, very few pictures of myself, as I am usually the one taking the pictures — some of which are electronically submitted for your approval here.)

And so, dear readers, you will find above a photograph of yours truly on one of my trips to Betty’s Bay, that splendid corner of the Cape.

A child’s imagination can transform the humblest construction of pillows into a fortification to equal the Krak des Chevaliers. On the grounds of my old school, there was a shack in a state of advanced dilapidation which I decided was an old slave cottage. I knew there was absolutely no chance of this being factually accurate — it probably didn’t date from any earlier than the 1910s — but one could easily picture Aunt Jemima living an abject poverty within its slowly crumbling walls. The shack was in one of the more peaceful corners of the school grounds, and there was an old rope hammock nearby, to which I would occasionally repair for a brief nap after a lunch of particular vivacity.

Despite its advanced deterioration, I found it a charming little structure, and it always saddened me that every map and plan I shuffled through in the Headmaster’s Office featured the parenthetical “(to be demolished)” atop the building’s outline. Indeed, it may have been destroyed already. (more…)

Sad to leave it. (I’m in London now).

A view of Edinburgh from the top of the no. 23 bus. (more…)

Instagram: @andcusack

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