How Nice to be in Provence...

A rented villa in Grasse, which is a few miles inland from Cannes and a little bit West of Nice, and the Kims and kids arriving from South Africa.. what a wonderful holiday. Marcela's friend Rodica was fantastic and arranged the villa, spent a fortune on Henry's christening and generally treated us like royalty.

Shivering in the snow

What a cold snap we've just had in Berkshire - cascades of snow, sleet, hail and that most English of phenomena, black ice. This is ice that lurks on the road but, in place of being white and easily visible (as all decent ice should be) it is a swart and shadowy film of slipperiness on the equally dark tarmac. Tricky stuff, and the small patch I hit while turning out of the little close we live in was lethal enough to send my large 4x4 sliding gently across the road to fetch up against the kerb with a very expensive crunch. Some interesting damage to the steering and suspension arms, and a salutary lesson that having 4 powered wheels does not help on snow and ice unless you also have studded tyres.


Never mind, Lily enjoyed it. She's a little dynamo now, and difficult to catch if she's in elusive mode, but she really enjoys being outdoors. Hopefully her Dad will soon get a real life somewhere sunny, instead of working hunched over a laptop all day and going home to a post-war semi in a damp country.

As Lily grows, the resemblance to Marcela becomes more pronounced. I'm grateful she didn't look like me, girls should be more delicate than that. Henry on the other hand is already a chunky little bloke, full of smiles and generally as happy as a clam except when he needs food or changing. They were both near as dammit 10 pounds at birth but I suspect will end up physically quite differently constructed.

Three months to go (from mid-March) until our summer holiday when we look forward to hosting some of our African family and spending weeks frolicking in the sun in England and France...

Once more unto the breech

No, not Hogga finally losing the grammar drummed into him by cousin and English teacher Guy Cary (another descendant of HF Cary), but an attempt at a pun combining Prince Harry a.k.a. Henry V, his famous speech from the play and the position our new arrival adopted for much of his pre-natal sojourn in Mummy's tummy. OK OK, weak, I know, but it's early on a freezing wet morning here in Birmingham..

Welcome to Henry Alexander Hodgson

And now, at last, I can reveal the world's worst kept secret! On 25th November my wife was delivered of a baby boy at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. In direct contrast to the arrival of Lily Beatrice, this time the pregnancy was uneventful and the birth was fraught. As I write this, Marcela and Henry are still incarcerated in the hospital after a week but that's mostly down to delays in processing blood tests and I am instructed by my darling wife to effect a jailbreak later today no matter what the medics say.

Henry Alexander is named Henry in honour of Henry Francis Cary, his many times great-grandfather who was born on 6th December 1772 and who later wrote the definitive translation of Dante's Inferno. H.F. Cary is buried in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey. When Henry grows up he can choose to be known as Henry, Harry (as is the English custom), Alexander or Alex. Or he can go with tradition and be called "Hogga" like I was.

So what can I tell you? The little mite was not so little - 9 pounds 14 at birth. This is 2 ounces less than Lily's birth weight but I suspect Harry is taller and thinner. Lily has shown little interest in her brother thus far during her visits to the hospital, apart from giving him a few prods and exclaiming "It's a baby!". She then proceeded to reprogram the TV console and partially dismantle the adjustable bedframe, displaying her engineering genetic inheritance from Marcela.

Thank God Granny from Moldova is here, looking after our precious and precocious first born... what with Marcela in Oxford and me spending long days on a contract in Birmingham, we'd have been in right trouble without someone keeping the home fire burning in Newbury.

Anyhoo I better do some work, more news will be posted later.

Sunshine and Sea in Cyprus

In an attempt to stock up on sunshine before the long dark winter months, we took ourselves off to the coast in Cyprus in late August. I managed to rent us a decent villa in the "Aphrodite Hills" resort and we used that as a base of expeditions to Paphos, Pissouri (where we met up with an old friend from Norfolk), Larnaca and the Troodos Mountains. All familiar territory, of course, from my days working for an American hardware company whose regional head office is in Nicosia.

The weather was warm but nowhere as hot as I'd expected - early thirties - and we managed to get slightly tanned without overdoing it. Lily was captivated by the villa's private swimming pool and we struggled to get her out of there for her naps, or for our trips to the sea.

Cyrpus is nice, very dry, very expensive and worth a visit but probably not worth buying a holiday home in. Although that's the perspective of a family with a baby - I guess if you're a couple with no kids or older kids you could do a lot worse. Certainly Jackie and Daryle go there every year, and their villa is a short walk from Pissouri's central plaza with great restaurants for outdoor sampling of the ubiquitous "meze" - dozens and dozens of different starter-type dishes, washed down with Keo beer.

All in all a good break - although our little madam got a bit overheated in the airport on the way back and threw the world's most spectacular tantrum. Still, the cathartic effect of that made her sleep all the way back to Gatwick so the trauma was I suppose worth it. She's generally a very good baby, cute and full of laughs, so we're happy to put up with the very occasional lapses.

Zimbos in West Berkshire

After all the frantic renovation activity and the atrocious weather of late March, compounded with the start of a West Midlands consulting contract that gave me a choice between staying away all week or spending 4 hours a day commuting, it was a relief when Craig and family arrived and the weather eased up a little. We drove up to Shropshire to see some relatives there, hosted some cousins for an al fresco meal on our back patio (although it was too cool to have a proper braai in the adjacent little brick-built pub which was a major contributory factor in purchasing this place) and generally had as good a time as we could in changeable weather.

It was great to see my African family meeting my ex-African now English family after a gap of some years, and I hope the more sunburned ones got a sense that it is quite possible to have a good life here in the UK.

Lots of Southern Africans are terrified of the unknown world outside their borders, and have been told tales of woe by the returning masses of carers, waitrons, supply teachers and the like who have suffered at the bottom of the economic ladder here, lived in squalid communes in bad parts of London, dealt with disturbed and feral inner-city schoolkids or incontinent old folk, earned low wages and generally had a bad time of it. Well there is a little more to life in the UK than that - but you have to do your homework before coming over, live somewhere other than Greater London and work as a professional.

I am not optimistic, however, that any of my immediate family will ever move to the UK. For various reasons they seem wedded to their various parts of Africa - I do understand the attraction of the dark continent, it is just as much part of my heritage and ancestry as theirs, but to me it is a simple equation. I believe that conditions in SA will never get better than they are currently, and for me they are currently unacceptable. I also believe that the inevitable battle for decreasing resources by members of an increasing population will make the future for my children very difficult.

Also, frankly, having lived in Europe since 2001 has given me a taste for other things that generally just don't exist back in Africa - dependable infrastructure, good health and education services, centuries of art and culture, cheap travel, great libraries and a huge array of community services, support groups and the like.

I miss the sunshine, my family and, funnily enough, the Afrikaans language. So here's the deal - if I win the Euromillions I'll move all the extended family to Italy and we can have sunshine and togetherness - and I'll play some Tolla van der Merwe comedy CD's now and then...

Springtime and renovations

I say Springtime - well sadly in the UK this year that has been more a technical term used by Druids than an actual experience. My long-lost and long-suffering family from Zimbabwe were planning a visit in a month or two, our house was still in dire need of loads of renovation and outside, instead of blue skies and flowers busting out all over we had somewhat more Arctic conditions. These pictures were taken in our front garden in late March....




... and as you can see there was a bit of a difference between local conditions and those prevailing in Harare where brother Craig and his family somehow manage to survive against all odds (and against all reason too, if you ask me).

My plans for taking the little ones somewhere jolly for a bit of outdoor fun looked in serious danger - and of course as mentioned in the previous post, the inside of our new house in West Berkshire was a war zone of builder's rubble too.

When we bought this little semi-detached post-war place it was in spite of the interior decor and not because of it; previous owners had demonstrated bizarre tastes in plaster, Artex, artificial stone, MDF and all the 1970's and 1980's lapses in judgement we have come to know and hate here in the UK.





For example the large living room had been partially sectioned off by a bizarre circular arch which led into a sort of snug, in the rear of which crouched a gas fire in amidst a horrible pile of moulded plaster, brickwork and stone that effectively cut a metre off the room space.


Space, incidentally, that we desperately need. Not only am I a packrat of note when it comes to books, papers and photographs, but having a child with a Hogga-like attention span means we need a plethora of toys to keep her amused.

Now as already established in earlier postings, my DIY abilities are small to non-existent; I have been known to pick up injuries reading the B&Q catalogue. So what we needed was the strong right arm of my brother in law Gabi - and to prove that his dexter forelimb is indeed as sturdy as advertised I proffer this picture of our living room after he had finished swinging his hammer.




Well done Gabi and many thanks!!

D.I.Y. and the Hogga family

Has it really been that long since I wrote an entry for my blog? The creeping apathy of my readership (who can no longer be relied on to prompt me in my writing) and my own complicated life (I have adopted a punishing schedule of commuting so as to avoid the hard work of renovating our house in Berkshire, cunningly leaving all the labour to my poor long-suffering wife) means that weeks and months slip by without any news of the Hogga household.

All in all, life proceeds. Our house is proving to be a bit of a DIY challenge (and sadly I am DIY-challenged at the best of times); luckily Marcela’s brother Gabi and some of his construction industry mates from London have been helping. Gabi went through the living room with a great deal of energy and a regrettably small hammer (we forgot to buy him a sledgehammer) and demolished the arches, faux stone cladding, quasi-Moorish plasterwork and just plain Artex stupidities and follies that a previous owner had inflicted on the house. Once his arms had stopped trembling and his ears had stopped ringing, he then supervised the Ukrainian and Polish plasterers as they went about their meticulous work downstairs and upstairs in the master bedroom. Here too a regrettable series of interior design choices by previous owners have had to be undone including the removal of a whole host of late Seventies built-in cupboards, cabinets, sliding mirror-door thingies and the like.

Lily is growing fast, speaking some words of Romanian and English and a whole lot of her own language which strangely seems to have a logic and syntax all of its own. I wonder if anyone has ever made a study of baby language? (apart from Chomsky of course). It is hilarious to get “told off” by her when she’s in a bit of a strop.

The weather has been atrocious and our next blog posting will contain pictures of the blizzard we experienced two weekends back. We’re now pretty much decided we need to live somewhere sunny – Marcela would prefer Italy (as being culturally close to her Roman ancestors) and frankly I don’t mind given that both Zimbabwe and South Africa are the basket cases us Afro-pessimists always suspected they’d become. Oz is just too, well, Australian to be frank – and not a lot in the way of culture (apart from the yoghurt), as well as having lethal ultraviolet and not much HR consulting for me to work in. New Zealand is too damp and too rural, France and Spain are full of English people and Cyprus is too dry. The Middle East is too darn hot and also not easy to buy a few acres in. Suggestions gratefully received – in the mean time we’re saving as best we can now that diesel is £1.22 a litre in the motorway service stations and a decent organic chicken costs over a tenner..

Ex Berkshire semper aliquid novi

The dawn of another year – and by all indications a year of change and movement. Not that this would be unusual for the Hogga household, to be sure. But certainly the harbingers and omens of more white water ahead are already popping up.

I guess I may have triggered these off by growing a festive beard. This is a nasty ginger affliction that appears whenever I get a week off from work and don’t have to go out in public much – and judging by the look on Lily’s face it is a good thing I shaved it off for New Year.

Lily herself, as is the way with babies, is developing at an incredible pace. Leaps and bounds, you might say, given that she took her first steps on Christmas day in front of the family gathering at Ashford Bowdler in Shropshire.

By New Year’s Eve she had to be retrieved from halfway up the staircase at Luke and Claire’s house in Norfolk and by her birthday on 19th January she was already deriving much amusement from stealing items from me and running away.

She’s a great kid, happy and alert – and not too grizzly apart from the bouts of teething that all kids get. Exhausting though, and I have no idea how Marcela survives being with her all day while I loll around at work.

Otherwise it has been a pretty dismal winter here in West Berkshire – dark and damp – and I must confess to scanning the intranet for jobs somewhere more inclined to sunshine. The temperatures are tolerable enough – we had only one cold snap of -5 degrees and today it’s 12 – but the dark gloom is what gets me. My equatorial upbringing has accustomed me to days that are pretty much the same length all year round, and to try and drive to work in the dark and then keep working a couple of hours after sunset is just profoundly disturbing. I end up semi-hibernating, gorging on carbohydrates and uninclined to any exertion… ah well, maybe the Hoggas will be lucky enough to find some work in the Middle East or Oz.. I’ve taken to smiling nicely at the company representatives from our more far-flung regions in the hope that they’ll take me home with them.. still, as long as the work allows me to spend time with baby Hogga then I'm fine..