I was never very good at being young, I just didn't have the experience. Nearly half a century later I've learnt something about myself which is genuinely valuable: I'm not that good at being old either. But you have to carry on, you really do, if only to spite the insurance company. But that face in the mirror, was that really me? If not, I was in the wrong house again.
When people say you should get away from the rat race, what they really mean is you need to get away from the human race. Nothing will re-charge your batteries quicker. Spread the map and let the Finger Of Destiny fall where it may.
Throwing caution to the wind, I navigated the deceptively straight road from Cape Town to Yzerfontein as best I could, taking a wrong turn on purpose merely to liven things up.
After an hour of driving nonchalantly through the backside of downtown Atlantis, where I was mistaken for someone rich and famous - or at least it felt that way at the robots where several men approached the car for my autograph - I got back on the main drag and continued to the coast.
By the side of the road were three camels behind a poorly constructed wire fence, which was next to a poorly constructed tree. The camels were kneeling in the skeleton shade, their lips dreaming of clouds. The world shimmered like a second-rate stripper in a poorly constructed story and all around the land was dry. The rains were late and grooves of red, raw earth stretched into the distance. An ant crawled over a half-eaten peach, pulling each one of its six feet slowly off of, then back onto, its new kingdom.The heat was unrelenting and I recalled a trip I took down the Nile and the time I saw an Egyptian beggar selling old prosthetic limbs. He was standing on a busy street corner, a pile of plastic arms sticking out of a torn wicker basket. Some arms pointed up, some pointed down or to the side at rakish angles. It looked like a gang of irate nudists had fallen from the sky and landed in this basket and were doing their best to get out again. Both of the beggar's own arms were also prosthetic and I wondered how he put them on in the morning.
I thought about Peter O' Toole in Lawrence Of Arabia and how much lipstick a camel might get through on a weekly basis. First, if it was single and led a quiet, homely sort of life; and second, if it was reasonably attractive, outgoing, was well-read and had made several wise investments in the stock market. Perhaps it was time to get out of the sun.Yzerfontein. The Iron Fountain. Everyone should sip from it a few times a year, or at least somewhere like it.
Centuries ago there was room for everyone, now things are a bit tight. Ancient orator and all-round egghead Seneca tells a tale of a slave in Rome who, rather than be a slave, ran headfirst into a wall and killed himself. I think what Seneca meant by this story is that freedom is only as far away as the next brick wall. It's how you approach the wall that makes the difference.
An ocean, an empty beach, more land than houses. A place where rush hour consists of four ostriches walking up the street. To see the sun set on the desiccated corpse of a whale with a glass of cold gin in your hand, that's living.
It was a beautiful weekend and when I got back home there was a job offer from Japan. They wanted me to teach English to the more gentle prisoners on Death Row. Sure, I turned them down, but only after I weighed up the Prose and Cons. 
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