All of my blog posts.
There are many places in Ontario named after English towns. Not far from Waterloo, there is a Norwich and down the road, the small town of Stratford hosts, perhaps predictably, an excellent Shakespeare festival. The other day I told a colleague I needed to leave the meeting we were at: I was travelling to London.
“Oh”, she responded, “So am I”.
The difference was she had to drive for an hour while my journey was to Pearson Airport, Amsterdam, and a connection to Heathrow.
I really like KLM and am a steadfast customer. Their loyalty cards were introduced about the time I began major travelling. As a result I rapidly reached the highest level (Platinum Elite, in case you were wondering). In the 1990s when you had held this for five years you were given lifetime status. I have been an ‘elite’ flyer since 1996. It does make a difference. The access to the lounges gives private space to work, relax, drink and shower; there is automatic seating in the premium economy cabin; priority on boarding and shorter queues.
This post was written by Rowan Whiteside.
Swaziland is one of the smallest and poorest countries in the world. Tucked between South Africa and Mozambique, it is often left off world maps – forgotten, or just deemed unnecessary.
This is the second posting to go up in a short time. The management of my website has moved to John Price. I want to say a big thank you to Shela McCullough and Linda Mtambo of HEARD for all that they did to keep my posts flowing! By early next year we will have looked at the design of the site and changed it. I hope to make it somewhat interactive.
I was in the UK and South Africa in late September and early October. The first part of the trip was covered in my last posting. This one is about Durban, Cape Town and Norwich. After 24 hours in Durban (a silly side trip because I was not paying attention to my travel plans), I flew to Cape Town for a Health Systems Symposium. These meetings are held every two years, this was the third, the first I had been to. As all my South African family lives in Cape Town and the environs I was able to see them. My visits to the South Africa will become less frequent in the years ahead, so this is important to me.
This posting has been in draft for nearly a year. I wanted to wait until all the actions were complete before posting. I could not come up with a catchy title. This is a story of unintended consequences, and unexpected and, as it turned out, unwanted inheritance and Chilanga cement company in Zambia.
My father, Walter Jack Whiteside, died in 1989 and left a complicated estate. In terms of the will two thirds was left to my mother and the balance divided between my father’s two daughters from previous marriages. My brother and I were the executors. It took a long time but we managed to wrap up most of the estate by about 1992. I used a local Durban attorney, Russell Sobey to help with this as most of the holdings were in South African shares.
My Skype picture is of a swallow. I think it is appropriate because I too flit between the northern and the southern hemispheres. Of course I put much less effort into this traveling than the birds do. Having said that, all my recent trips have been in economy class on KLM. Admittedly premium economy, but still economy! I won’t dwell on this other than to say the flights I took recently were packed, a combination of the holiday season and KLM doing really well.
I hope to put up a guest posting on my website as my daughter, Rowan has spent a month in Southern Africa, mostly Durban. We shared a road trip. I have invited her to contribute and we will have to see when this happens. No pressure Rowan. She is embarking on the MA in creative writing at UEA this academic year. It is one of the best MAs in the world, with an illustrious list of alumni.
What do Waterloo, Ontario and Mbabane, Swaziland have in common? Apart from the fact that I have lived in both! A few nights ago, in Waterloo, there was a severe thunderstorm, the first I have experienced here. The flashing and crashing reminded me of the summer afternoon thunderstorms in Mbabane. The high veld of Swaziland has one of the highest rates of lightning strikes in the world. I gleaned this factoid when, as a freelance reporter, on the monthly newspaper ‘Business in Swaziland’, I interviewed the CEO of the Swaziland Electricity Board. This writing experience of nearly 40 years ago was great fun. We were paid 75 cents per column inch published, which meant that as soon as the paper appeared, we ‘journalists’ took out a ruler to work out what was due to us.
On 30 May I took possession of my new digs. It is an apartment in Seagram Lofts, an old distillery building, literally just across the parking lot from the Balsillie School of International Affairs. This will be the shortest journey to work I will ever have had. Given that I have always tried to take jobs that allowed me to go home for lunch, it is extraordinarily close, even by my standards. I will be putting pictures up on my website. The estate agent who took care of me Dave MacIntyre also introduced me to the Kitchener Squash club. This has been a great help in making me feel I can live here! The lofts are really fantastic space and they have been extremely well converted. The squash club does what it says on the tin, and provides a good useful space to get together with a minority who share at least one of my interests.
The idea that one should take good care of one’s teeth is drummed into us and we try to pass the message on. Boy, do I believe it now. The water in Kenya, where I was born and spent my early years, and Swaziland, where I grew up, did not have fluoride added. As a result I have more than the average number of fillings and crowns. It is likely the lack of brushing and eating sweets that were significant contributors, but I would prefer to think that fluoride was the issue.
I wrote this post after travelling to Kenya and concluded it was a rather depressing trip in some ways. The reason for the travel was a board meeting for AIDSpan a small NGO whose mandate is to watch and support the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria. I went over from the UK on Wednesday and returned to Norwich on a late flight on Saturday evening arriving back on Sunday. The flight from Nairobi to Amsterdam is longer than the one from Toronto to Amsterdam. I don’t think I appreciated that Canada was so close, or maybe that Nairobi was so far.
Alan Whiteside 