Plus one thousand. And three more for in case.
I learnt a hell of a lot about life from him over the years via the common bond we all have here in photography.
Riaan, I can tell you that I also learned from communicating with you: writing about my own emotions, tastes in books and photographers and whatevers, made me realise things that were inside me of which I'd not really been particularly aware myself until I actually articulated them in an e-mail, and things like that. My mother was a great letter writer; she kept up correspondences with people she knew from what one could almost describe as lives ago. I think that when you do that, you discover so much of yourself to be common ground within other's minds; the growing experience becomes mutual. Perhaps that's a principal draw of the Internet: when you discover some hidden corner where you can be helped, just by being present, to begin to know yourself better.
Your life in SA and the period of my own in India are perhaps not that different, except that though as rash as you have sometimes been,
I never did get bitten on the ass by a cobra or anything else. Okay, a mosquito, then. That said, I was still a kid when we left there, and so finding myself back in the UK wasn't as difficult an adjustment as it might otherwise have been. However, as a result, my inability to feel totally British or even anything other than vaguely European has led me to thinking that prolonged separation from some mother country or the other can make your life less than straightforward: it becomes difficult to embrace national fantasies of innate superiority and, as difficult, to love a lot of national characteristics and interests. Especially sports! Let's not even
mention Brexit.
Thanks,
Rob
