Water water on the wall

Unspoilt beach in Cape Town.  Is that possible?  Baden Powell drive links Muizenberg to Stellenbosch.  For about four kilometers this road runs along the spring high tide line.  Every so often, kelp is washed right across the painted white traffic lines.  Cemetery Beach is where the sea and road run side by side.  Was Baden Powell somehow linked to Cemetery Beach?  The link is not obvious.  Baden Powell spent very little time in Cape Town and was buried in Kenya.  Perhaps he once went for a swim in the nearby waters..  His pen chance for swimming earned him the nick name Lord Bathing Towel.

And today this stretch of coast is a favourite angling spot, a sometime surf break and a full-time home for the Kelp Gull.  Every so often an oyster catcher can be seen scurrying about, defying its endangered status.  Good news is that the busy beach is generally tidy.  Once again our mother city fathers are dusting away litter treaded footprints.

Water and wind

CS Lewis wrote about his early life in a book titled "Surprised by Joy".  The name of the book was most likely chosen from the first line penned by Wordsworth in his poem of the same name.  "Surprised by joy, impatient as the wind.  But back to CS Lewis.  Here is a small segment from the book.

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, whilst most of my friends had and sometimes took me for a drive.  This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while they remained ordinary and as inaccessible as the Moon.  The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me.  I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the combustion engine.  I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed "infinite riches" in what would have been to motorists a "little room".  The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it "annihilates space".It does.  It annihilates the most glorious gifts we have been given.  It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels one hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from travelling ten.  Of course if man hates space and wants it annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once?  There is little enough space there.

Shortly after publishing, but sometime after writing "Surprised by Joy", CS Lewis met and later married Joy Gresham.