It All Starts Here...

THE 1960s: STARTING MY GROWING UP IN CAPE TOWN.

CAPE TOWN: SUNDOWNER HOUR

Touchdown. Being blessed with a firm sense of aesthetics from a very early age, I decided to pop into this world in one of its most beautiful cities, Cape Town (South Africa) in 1965. The first thing I did was what any normal person would do who's been cooped up somewhere without access to a loo - I took a leak. Trouble was, at that age it was a tad hard to tell the difference between the Doctor's face and a urinal. Oh well, I had better luck in later life. So did the Doctor.

I also learned that my star sign made me a Leo, though I was born in the Chinese Year Of The Snake in what's probably the most famous hospital in Africa, Groote Schuur. It was catapulted to the world's front pages in the mid-60s as the site of the world's first heart-transplant operation. The hospital itself lies on the slopes of Devil's Peak, one of the three biggest pieces of rock which loom over the city and which is just visible to the left of the biggest - Table Mountain. Devil's Peak is also the place where I watched three South African Air force training jets crash in 1970, a few hundred metres above the freeway bend beside which the hospital stands.

BRINGING UP BABY. My Dad, Clyde, was finishing off his architectural degrees at Cape Town University (see his pic on the right) and then began working as an architect in the late 60s, while my Mom, Liz, was doing - erm -  motherly things, like keeping my fingers out of electrical power outlets and stuff. They met while she was a student at the Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town.
CUTE? I spent my first few years learning how not to trip over furniture in the Cape Town suburbs of Oranjezicht (a really old area on the slopes of Table Mountain - see info about it) and then in the leafy southern suburb of Pinelands, where I started school at The Blue School a.k.a Pinelands Primary.

OBLIGATORY BABY PIC. CUTE!!!

JO'BURG. In the early 1970s, my Dad decided to move with his wife and three sons (me, Zane and Shelley) from 'the Mother City', Cape Town, to South Africa's biggest city, Johannesburg. He got hold of a big place in the smallholding belt of Honeydew, set up his own architectural practice and had two more sons, Ryan and Darrell. 
Go to our Johannesburg page...

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