After a month on a passenger liner, with mum dealing with a couple of little brats trying to fling themselves overboard, the family arrived in Cape Town; after disembarking and going through the usual hassle of customs, we jumped on the next train bound for Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, our home for the next 12 years.

Botswana was an amazing place to grow up and was (and still is) one of the few success stories in Africa. They hadhave a strong economy, a peaceful culture, and are proud owners of the richest diamond mine in the world (http://www.khulsey.com/jewelry/diamond_mines_botswana.html). The Africans in Botswana are very different to the rest of Africa in that they have always been a peace-loving and relaxed culture (with the odd bit of witch-doctoring here and there). Compare this to their neighbour South Africa (where we moved to from Botswana later on) where the Xhosa’s and Zulus have been fighting for hundreds of years and still continue to slaughter each other to this day; or to Zimbabwe, another neighbour, where the country lies in ruin under a mad dictator, and you will realise just what a gem of a place Botswana actually is… a real diamond in the rough so to speak.

The other amazing thing about Botswana is the weather: if you want summer year round then this is the place to be. The average temperature in summer sits around 40-44 Celsius; I remember spending entire days in the swimming pool when it got up into the 50’s on occasion. I’m not sure growing up in this sort of heat was conducive to comfortable living when I moved over to the UK in later years; I often thought I would freeze to death while half the people around me were wearing T-shirts. On the other hand, when it comes to doing sport in the heat, I love it; it seems that the hotter it gets, the more of an advantage I have over my fellow competitors who seem to die once temperatures get over 30 degrees… once it gets over 40C I’m in my element!

Our first house in Botswana was a comparative mansion to where we had been living in the UK; it had two bedrooms, a study (later converted to a third bedroom upon the arrival of my younger brother, Conrad, 4 years later), a kitchen and separate lounge, and a plot of land that contained… dust! But to my folks it was a real start at a new life and, after the row upon row of the council housing that they had just left, the open space of Africa seemed like another planet. Oh yes, we also had 2 maids thrown into the deal which took mum a bit of getting used to; I will never forget them as they became my two African mothers, Elda and Rebecca; the patience of these two lovely women was astounding as both myself and my brother are headstrong little buggers at the best of times; no doubt we must have pushed their boundaries at times but they both seemed to have limitless love and patience. In the years that they brought us up I never remember them for anything more than their beautiful smiles and constant support.

To be continued…