The weather in Durban has been glorious, warm days (22-24°C) with cool nights. One bonus of this is there are few mosquitoes, which is unusual. What normally happens is I am just dropping off to sleep when there is a piercing hum in my ear. A mosquito, and it can’t be ignored. The little bastards are persistent, and action has to be taken. I have spray and mat to deter them. I had a friend and former colleague stay with me for just under a week. He is a good friend whom I have known for over 40 years. We played touch rugby with academics, trade unionists and people who wanted a good run around, once a week for many years. He and I did a couple of road trips which appear in blog archives (here and here).

I call him Sancho in my blogs after Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza, let’s not dwell on who that makes me. Sharing space is always challenging, but we managed. He is an exceptionally good cook and took care of the food in the evenings that we did not go out. The last dinner we had together was a roast: beef and vegetables. This is not something I would attempt, so it was much appreciated.

He is also a professional smoker but accepts being banished to the balcony. Despite this, the odor of cigarette smoke crept into the living area. I smoked a pipe for many years and then moved to King Edward cigars. It is about 25 years since I last smoked, and it is baffling to me that I ever did. Both my parents smoked – my father a pipe, and my mother cigarettes, so it seemed an obvious thing to do as a young man. I took up a pipe because I thought it would be a connection with my dad. The first pipe I smoked made me so ill that I shamefully called for help from the duty nurse at university! Despite this, and unbelievably, I persisted.

I have kept up my regimen of walking at least ten kilometers per day, trying to be out at about seven in the morning. This is crucial in the summer when it gets hot very quickly. There are at least three troops of monkeys that live in the neighbourhood and I normally see two troops during my walk. My heart is in my mouth when they cross one of the busy roads, but so far, I have not seen one hit. They don’t appear to have any road sense, so I suspect it is luck. A few nights ago, I was woken in the small hours by a persistent monkey alarm call, but, given the large number of trees in the area I have no idea where it was coming from. It was a change from house and car alarms!

The flat is quite noisy sometimes. There is the constant drone of the traffic on the freeway a few hundred metres away, but at night there are, additionally, the sounds from the port area. This can best be described as a constant hum, with the occasional crash from goods trains being shunted in the marshalling yards. My place is on the first ridge leaving Durban, so the sound comes up from the docks. Added to this is the Bluff (both a geographical feature and the name of a suburb) on the far side of the port which reflects the noise. It is a busy city.

The worst though are ambulance and emergency vehicle sirens. As previously mentioned, the road I live on is the route to the freeway. What is objectionable is that the crew seem to switch on the sirens right outside the flat. This wakes up the hadadas, a type of Ibis who roost in the trees beside the road. They add their voices to the cacophony. Hadadas do not have a melodic call: the ‘ha ha ha’ noise is jarring at the best of times, but in the middle of the night it is especially unwelcome. The Wikipedia entry says they call at dawn and dusk, but in my experience they also squawk if they are alarmed. I think they simply enjoy the noise they make, if only I could say the same.

On the 8th June I walked to the freeway and watched some of the Comrades’ Marathon. This is run between Pietermaritzburg and Durban every year alternating between up and down runs. It is about 90 km in length but varies slightly depending on the start and finish points. The first race, with just 34 official entrants, was run in 1921 to commemorate the First World War. I have only once got up at 5am to see a run that started in Durban, but when it begins in Maritzburg the first runners heave into sight at about 11am.

There were 20,974 runners in the 2025 field and 18,209 finished. The first to cross the line was Tete Dijana, a South African man who completed the course in 5 hours and 25 minutes. The first woman was also South African: Gerda Steyn in 5 hours and 51 minutes and she was an impressive 29th in the field. South Africans dominated the podium, the Russian, and presumably Belarusian runners were not allocated a country! Interestingly there were a number of Basotho in the first 100. In my view just finishing is a remarkable achievement.

I was pleased I took time to watch. I was on the freeway to see the first 100 or so go past. There seemed quite a gap between the first 30, but looking at the times, the longest gap was 20 seconds! The runners I saw seemed to be enjoying the event, some even had the energy to acknowledge the cheering onlookers. They had only 5 kilometers to the finish at that point, so the end was in sight. The spectators were all ages and races, some tracking competitors they were related to, or knew. It was really heartening to be part of it.

It was a warm day, so I walked to the flat for a drink but went back again in the afternoon. It seemed unreasonable to watch the final runners desperately trying to beat the cut-off, so I did not stay for that. I met one of the runners a couple of weeks later who made it with 10 seconds to spare. He is in his early 70s and has done this marathon many times! It is one of the sporting events that the country excels at, and more and more people engage with it, although there may be a limit to the number who can run due to the roads. The press reported that there were no deaths, which is, of course, how it should be!

Durban embraces inclusive sports events; many centered on the beach front. There are regular competitive swims from various beaches (no drownings are reported). A Sunday or so ago there were women’s five- and ten-kilometer road races, and at the same time the paddlers were out negotiating their way round a marked course. I have registered, and printed my bar code, for the five-kilometer park run. These are events started 20 years ago which take place all over the world on Saturday mornings. There are three in Durban. The movement’s founder is Paul Sinton-Hewitt CBE. He was born in Southern Rhodesia but grew up in South Africa, and founded Park Run in London.

I have been slowly working on my memoir. One of the ways to get my head into the right space is to read books which do what I am attempting. I have just finished The Heart is the Size of a Fist (Kwela Books, 2021) by a colleague Pieter Fourie. He calls it a novel, but …. It is about a boy’s complicated relationship with his alcoholic father, his mother and the attempts to escape and live a life. It is well worth reading. For lighter moments I had Spud: The Reunion by John van de Ruit, (Pan MacMillan, 2024) the fifth in the Spud series. These are set in a boarding school in the Natal midlands in the dying days of apartheid. They are different but both are about struggles.