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Taking stock, five years on from the pandemic we were about to meet

The Albert Room, Victoria Manor Hotel, Cradock. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

20 Dec 2024

Roads dissipate like shape-shifting mirages when the stories of the unfolding years dissolve into what’s really in front of you. As the final days of the year are swallowed up, you cast an eye over your shoulder and realise how far you’ve all come.

It’s been five years since “all that” came our way. Pandemic and imaginary journeys recited from your front room. Masks and hand washing, a premium on hospital beds. Shuttered in our homes, watching multitudes of sea birds swoop and sway above West Coast beaches on TV while the humans hide. Sourdough and banana bread and skinny people turning to fat. And the news on the breeze: so-and-so died, did you hear?

And then, before you can blink, it’s late 2024, five years after we had no idea what was just around the corner. Life slowly becomes normal again. The roads open up to us again and off we go.

At the end of a year that has been significant in many ways for me, I find myself looking back five, 10 and more years and weighing everything up. I suppose this is inevitable when your next birthday ends in a Big Fat Zero.

A new journey was set in motion, though we didn’t know it

Roads take us away and they bring us back home. Quite which way that is depends on the year and month. Sometimes home becomes the destination. And sometimes the destination becomes home.

In 2010, travelling from Cape Town to Cradock meant driving from home to our travel destination. At the end of that drive, a new journey was set in motion, though we didn’t know it. Now, at the end of 2024, we are approaching the culmination of that long, long journey.

Cradock, then, was the destination of our journey from home. Four years later it became our home and for 10 years since then, Cape Town has been a holiday destination.

The day we arrived in Cradock in 2014, we met a remarkable woman, a true individual in the best sense of the word, who was to become one of our closest friends. Her name is Sandra Antrobus and she owed me a sheep, she said. Blamed me for the success of her business, the Victoria Manor and Tuishuise (I’d written about her fledgling venture in 1993 and forgotten about it). For 10 years I have denied responsibility and though I still haven’t been given the sheep, I’ve eaten it in chops by now. Maybe twice.

Every road away from here has brought us back days or weeks later, punctuated over and over again by dinners in the hotel dining room and conversations in the bar or at the fire in the reception lounge.

And Sandra, hear me now, I will always come back.

Living in a small town for 10 years narrows down your life in one way and opens it up in others. Far away becomes closer, the near seems remote. On more occasions than you can remember, you climb in the car and you travel.

To Graaff-Reinet or PE for a weekend, just for a change. To family in Cape Town for a kid’s birthday, a Christmas, or just “because”. Impulsive trips to Arniston, “because why not”. A few weeks later, “let’s go somewhere”, and three days later you’re meeting the family in Clarens. Cape Town, so many times, because it’s always been home, even when we lived in England, even despite the decade in the Karoo.

Family holidays, work trips to Joburg, Durban and who knows where. Back to Oranjemund in 2019 via Port Nolloth, after 49 years away. Helsinki and Lisbon, just a year apart. Festivals and reminiscences; Des Lindberg mourning his Dawn in song at our local festival, the first time he'd sung in public since her passing, and months later sitting in his darkened lounge in Plettenberg Bay, two old men talking about the then and the now, with whisky and, on the walls, paintings of a legend and life partner taken by Covid. Not that we could see them in the load shedding blackness.

The trip to Cape Town in 2015 when my English mate Phil came over. Three nights later, he’s stabbed to near death, stumbling out of a Gardens Centre lift, bloodied and crying hopelessly. He recovered, physically, but mentally he’s still troubled. There’s a chapter on it in his book, which has sold all over the world. I feel responsible, I can’t help it. It was my idea that he come over.

A month later, back to Cape Town and meeting Branko Brkic, the start of my Daily Maverick journey. Darkness turns to light.

Food and wine take the mind off the premature grief

Sunday feasting at Wolfgat in Paternoster, West Coast. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

And suddenly, it’s 2024. In this tumultuous year, I’ve travelled far and wide. To Joburg via PE/Gqeberha, to Cape Town, and thrice to Calvinia, and on two occasions well beyond it to see my sister Pat (while she still remembers me) and boet Gerry (because the man she married slowly morphed into my true brother) in Piketberg and on to Paternoster for languid lunches at Wolfgat with chef Kobus and, this last time, Chef Johannes Richter from Durban as well.

An hour’s drive away from Paternoster, I’m watching my sister fade away from a distance and I’m sorry but I have to write it down somewhere so it might as well be here. I feel I’m in half-mourning. Respites with old friends and new and glasses of wine with them and plates of food shared take the mind of the fading and the premature grief.

At both ends of two of the journeys from Cradock to Calvinia I spent days in the Boekehuis writing two separate book projects, one of which is complete and delivered (though revisions await), while the other warrants a return trip in 2025 for completion and submission to a publisher. I ask myself: will I be published in my 70th year?

We went to De Rust twice, this lovely green hamlet near the mysterious entrance to the enchanting Meiringspoort at the other end of which we found the approach to Prince Albert and the inaugural Vino Camino wine festival. Our other journey took us via Calvinia to the N7 and the Cederberg, a part of the country I hardly knew at all, strangely.

Justin Bonello was our host there, what a guy, what a mensch, as unaffected as they come, and we went on from there to Cape Town where we were spoilt at the Mount Nelson and got a taste, after a long time, of City Bowl life.

Which is apposite, but first, back home to Cradock via the R62 and De Rust, again, this time to meet our friends Ann and Retief, who we drove via Meiringspoort next morning to Prince Albert for a long stroll along the endless main drag.

The guinea pigs gave the green light to Colleen Penfold’s lemon ice cream, which she said was made by friends at Old Eden Lemon Company. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

In Prince Albert that day, Colleen Penfold, our host for the Vino Camino visit, was in her shop and ushered us on to her stoep to become guinea pigs, she said. She had that day opened the verandah of her Prince Albert Country Stay and brought us the most delicious lemon ice cream made with Gay’s Dairy Guernsey cream, free range eggs, and Old Eden Lemon Company lemon products. Just sublime.

We’ll be with Ann and Retief this weekend, to trawl through five decades of shared stories and toast all we love.

But, back home, another long journey had been in progress since April. Days after my return from Calvinia, where I had been for three weeks, we were at the Market Street Party during the annual Cradock Food Festival, when Sandra turned to me in the street, with the reception door of her hotel behind her, and asked me if I knew about her cancer.

I… sort of did… I said, having not wanted to pry until she was ready to tell me. Then she lifted her head with something like defiance, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Tony, I Am Going to Fight This!” All in Sandra’s Capital Letters.

She would not want me to go into details, but the road has been long and fraught. We have not seen her in her hotel once in all these months, which is a strange thing indeed; only on rare visits to her at home, when she’s felt a little stronger. She is always there, in normal times, with her lists and her distractions. The “girls”, Cherie and Lisa, have kept it all going magnificently and without complaint. But these times are not normal.

Seeing someone you love turn frail before your eyes is hard. Never leaving the house. Hair falling. Barely eating. Feeling helpless and useless, you scramble for something, anything, that could make even the tiniest difference.

One evening at Sandra’s, Cherie said she’d heard that bone broth is good for chemotherapy patients. I climbed down a rabbit hole and found all sorts about it, which I wrote about here.

Great pots of bone broth were strained and put into tubs and frozen. Feta tubs of it lined her freezer to be thawed daily and consumed. Every second week she had to miss her chemo because the bloods weren’t right. Every day, I pictured Sandra in front of me, “I am going to fight this thing!”

This is something you might want to make for anyone you love who is enduring chemotherapy — it contains masses of nutrients which seep out of the bones into the broth during up to 42 hours of cooking. You can multiply my recipe to fit your largest pot. Please share it with anyone you know who might need this core nourishment.

I thought, ‘hah!’, you don’t know Sandra

The Albert Room, Victoria Manor Hotel, Cradock. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

I winced every time somebody, on hearing how rampant her cancer was, turned doleful and muttered things like “oh that doesn’t sound good” and “oh dear, I hope they’re all prepared for the worst”.

And I pictured Sandra in front of me and thought, hah! You don’t know how determined Sandra can be. Somebody wiser said, “If I were cancer I wouldn’t take on Sandra.”

And that brings a smile, because, look…

Last week she got, not quite the all-clear, but doctors shaking their heads in disbelief and saying it’s all but gone. Only spots remain, and new, lighter chemo begins in the new year to put paid to that.

I’m embarrassed to say that at times I had feared the worst, and at one point I had wondered if she had made the best decision in her determination to “fight this thing”. And, just before Christmas, the best result imaginable.

Whimsical plates, playful and happy

There was no need for a thank you other than for the doctors and medicine itself, but Cherie, who runs the hotel food operation and kitchen, invited us to dinner at the hotel anyway and the Antrobi clan are not to be turned down lightly (it’s the informal plural of their name).

In the library of the lovely hotel that we first fell in love with in 2o10, and where Sandra once sat me down on a Sunday morning and said, right, what are you writing next, and which led me to write my play An Audience with Miss Hobhouse, Cherie sent us courses of delightful plates on a Christmas theme.

She was testing her menus for groups who wanted to book their staff lunches or dinners. Whimsical plates of watermelon Christmas stars and glazed ham, and strawberry Father Christmases, playful and happy.

How sweet it was to see Cherie emerge from the kitchen with a smile after months of being right alongside her mother while she went through this. Lisa too, managing the hotel in her stoic way. Champions, both.

Twinkly things and laughter await

And now, the new year is nearly upon us and it is nearly time to leave Cradock behind, to live in Cape Town once again, other than for the visits we will make, and that we will; Cradock is too important for us to leave behind. Half of our friends are there, and I’ve said, many times, “We have more of a social life in Cradock than we ever had in Cape Town.” I wasn’t kidding.

But being back in the Mother City, somewhere between the City Bowl and the Winelands, will place me perfectly for covering wine and food in the region myself.

Keep fighting this thing, Sandra. Who else is going to give me my sheep?

For now, family beckons. Twinkly things and laughter await. See you in my 70th year. DM

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