Brotherhood of the sea
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
WELL, Captain Allen Brink seemed to have had a shave before I caught up with him at a splendid bash down in Glenwood a couple of evenings ago but the eye was glittering as ever. What this ancient mariner had stopped me for – as well as scores of other people – was a celebration of his 60th birthday.
This former master mariner, who has on occasion lifted a stave or two in song at the Street Shelter for the Over-40s, is today a nautical surveyor and a member of all kinds of international maritime bodies, currently president of one that is headquartered in London.
Our connection is that we both of us once trained at the General Botha nautical college. He went on to become an Extra Master Mariner. I left the navy with the exalted rank of Able Bodied Seaman. (But then I was in the real navy, not the merchant navy).
He lives in an extraordinary place – three storeys looking out over Durban bay, the top two having decks that give a sense of the flying deck on a ship. The highest one inevitably has a telescope. The view over the bay is all-encompassing.
I offered to perform a swallow dive from the top deck, into the pool way below where a band was belting it out non-stop and the folk were dancing bambaduza at the edge. But Allen said diving was permitted only from the second floor. No, I like a real challenge so decided against.
Down below, the house is festooned with ships' bells, ships' wheels (to steer with, stoopid!), navigation lights, that kind of thing (I trust not wreckage salvaged from Allen's past commands).
Hey, what atmosphere, what a blast! What fun chatting to the old seadog and his mates. And you know what? He doesn't look a day over 80.
Billy O'Hagan
I'M SADDENED to read in the London Daily Telegraph of the death of Billy O'Hagan, once a maverick of newspapers in these parts but for decades a maverick in England of sausage-making, the Campaign for Real Ale and journalism .
He died in the employ of the Telegraph, working the graveyard shift of 9pm to 4 am, and is described in his obituary as "a genial Daily Telegraph reporter with a generous girth and a flair for self-publicity which he used to great effect in his mission to revive the great British sausage."
Genial, generous girth, flair for self-publicity … Yep, that was Billy. I was at school with him and used to meet up with him when he held court in the Durban Press Club.
Billy went to Britain as a somewhat erratic and unfocused opponent of apartheid. I met up with him there and spent a bit of time with him. He was a lot of fun – but a loose cannon.
Later he did find a focus, and this was rescuing the British sausage from ignominy. Billy had been taught how to make sausages as a child in Kokstad and he set about producing sausages, initially from his garage, with a high content of quality meat and herbs – sometimes also beer.
He became a media personality, "bubbling with boozy bonhomie", as the Telegraph puts it. He won big contracts. He was named Food Merchant of the Year and Best Sausage-maker in Britain.
He was a leading figure in the highly successful Campaign For Real Ale – a reaction to the mass production that had been creeping in – and at the Great British Beer Festival at Olympia in 1994, he failed valiantly in an attempt to taste each of the 240 brews on show.
O'Hagan was larger than life. The Telegraph obituary notes that during his military service in South Africa he played the saxophone in the orchestra of the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) – the safest place to be. Yeah! That's exactly the kind of pub yarn Billy would tell those gullible Poms. We're the poorer for his passing.
Tailpiece
A POLITICIAN is asleep in bed with his wife when a bolt of lightning lights up the entire room.
Politician (leaping out of bed): "I'll buy the negatives! I'll buy the negatives!"
Last word
Facts are stupid things.
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