My Moving Day in 5 Weeks

This red truck with white horse insignia (safety and strength possibly), was hovering outside when I came home for lunch.

I will be moving in a few weeks, and have already discarded a lot. The most painful was the Zipp 3001 Trispoke which cost almost R4000 a few years ago, and I really got very little use out of it. It was a sudden and exceedingly generous gift from my dad. I have hung onto it for ages, but the time eventually came to face the fact that it was no longer useful. What an incredible waste! I could no longer use it because the gear ratios simply didn't match - technology turned the hub section into a fossil, although the design of the rim itself remains cutting edge stuff you'd find on a Space Shuttle.

I feel like part of me lives in the perfection of that rim, and just discarding it wasn't easy. A lot of hopes and dreams went into getting it from America when I was a triathlete just starting out. It served me well once or twice or three times at the most.

It helped me do a fantastic 105km Cycle in the Vanderbijlpark Ironman - I was 4th off the bike there, but pulled out (still 4th) at 18km on the run. The race was meant to be a warm up for an Ultraman, and sure enough, I did used the Spoke again in the 132km cycle in the Durban Ultraman. I came off 7th with a spot virtually guaranteed to the World Champs in Nice. My run was terrible (sounding familiar?) but I still finished with a credible time under 7 hours (but dropped to 29th overall) for the 3/4 Ironman. It could be argued that the combination of hills and 2 trispokes crashed my legs before the run, and so those wheels actually held me back rather than set me up...

Moving for me has been a characteristically uneasy period. This is probably because disasters have closely followed many of my sudden transplantations. My first move was out of 108 Klerck Avenue to our farm, and within days or weeks, the whole place burned down and what was left was burgled. The second time, and last time I left 108 (where I grew up) I stayed with a very prissy kind of guy - the kind of guy who takes the plate out of your hand as you're finish eating your last forkful, and goes and washes it. I remember he used to wash out yoghurt containers and empty chip packets. It has rubbed off on me a bit, I have to say.

A week before I was due to leave Maidenhead (just outside London) I got kicked out on suspicion of stealing someone's biltong (beef jerky). I asked my father to intervene, since the owner of the house was his buddy, but mysteriously he didn't and months of living on the cheap (in their living room, behind the couch) were made even more painful by being finally dumped unceremoniously on a pavement with 4 huge items of luggage, nowhere to go, and no money (since it was Saturday, the banks had just closed and I had not had the foresight to draw any money). That night I slept in a Drug Rehabilitation Centre for about 10 quid, left half my stuff with a taxi driver and went to Scotland. Edinburgh is not a good place for the brokenhearted, and a youth hostel even more so. It is such a harrowing memory I can only remember scattered fragments.

I went through a string of moves after Samantha and I split, from Bloemfontein, to Rhodes, to Hout Bay - and I remember inside that whole whirlwind was an overland trip in a jeep (I peeled for two weeks!), destroying the jeep's waterpump but soldiering on to Cape Town and an excellent U2 concert.

I lived in Cape Town before the return trip to England, and then I bounced from Bayswater, to Aberdeen, to Edinburgh, to Bristol. In Bristol I stayed with four university girls in a house in Clifton, before moving to a much cheaper neighborhood in Bath Road. What a marvelous shithole that was. The guy in the room next door went to jail a few weeks after I moved in.

I moved out months later, and started my ascension from Walthamstow, into one spectacular working environment after another. From Canary Wharf to Embankment to Tower Bridge I capped off a 2 year period with wage rates more than triple the minimum wage I got when I started out in 1997 with Samantha as a kitchen porter.
I'd also worked as a postman, a toothpaste filler for Colgate, a overnight print setter in Slough where Sam's bicycle was stolen, a house mover, a packer for Avery, a loader, an exam invigilator, a call centre rep, loads of data entry for companies like AXA Sunlife, an accounts payable clerk for Somerfield, a guinea pig for Smithkline Beecham in London, Harris Labs in Belfast and others in Edinburgh and place names I can't remember anymore - nearly a roughneck on an oil rig somewhere off Glasgow, a personal slave to a cripple in Oxford and was unsuccessfully encouraged by a guy in Bayswater to pose for a gay magazine.

I also met so many new and old friends, some from school, some from university, some from swimming, some just new. Those two years were an incredible (and often incredible taxing)rite of passage. I did my one and only triathlon in Eaton, when I was in the UK, on the same Sunday Princess Diana died.

After my Visa expired I returned to Cape Town and in a year I moved four times: in response to my grandmothers home going up for auction, the next place was Prince Road but although outside the house was a perfect white wedding cake, inside it was a dull, dreary house full of locked doors and drug addicts. After that I moved into a nice little place in Vredehoek (which means Peacefulcorner), and just after buying a cellphone - the only one I have ever had, and I had it for a single day, we suffered an extremely devastating burglary.

We (Corneli and I)skipped up the mountain and planted ourselves in Davenport Road. But here the cockroaches came out and drove us into Flower Road. That was good at times, but towards the end two of the occupants got severely depressed and wanted to jump out of the window!
I left Flower Road pretty much on my own terms, although I always felt something was brewing there too.

The portent of doom certainly hangs over this whole process of displacement. I will not be able to take all my possessions in one go, to South Africa. And I am not sure if I even want to do that at this point. It's possible I will be back here in April, but it's too soon to say for sure.
I have two computers, a printer, a flatscreen monitor, two bicycles, a TV, loads of books and pots and pans, a digital video camera and about a thousand CD's. I will probably leave most of the stuff with Corneli, and if I need it I will organize for it to be shipped.

This next move will be one of the first in years to be completely voluntary, and with almost certainly no pressure. That's a good feeling. It's also a good feeling that I will probably at the same time be sad to leave this place, but also embrace where I am going, and the people that are there.