As regular readers of this Blog should now be well aware, I decided, several years ago, to act on my extended mid-to-late-life-crisis by turning my back on the city and moving out in to the country. In a life riddled with bad judgement calls it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.

My new home was spacious, filled with light; outside the windows and from the balcony I had stunning views over the Karkloof valley and hills and its surrounds. Here is the odd thing though. For some perverse reason I kept believing that I didn’t really deserve to live in such a beautiful place.

I felt – and still feel – incredibly lucky.

Maybe it was due to the fact that I have never had much money and therefore didn’t expect the sort of things some rich folk (and their offspring) take as their God-ordained due. Or maybe it was because I had spent the previous twenty-five years of my life living behind razor wire in a cottage a little bigger than a dog kennel – and about as well kept – in the middle of Maritzburg’s CBD, and had come to assume this was my lot forever.

With a bit of self-therapy (in a probably misplaced attempt to attain a state of higher consciousness I took up oil painting. To try and unlock those repressed memories I began this blog) and lots of long, bracing, walks, I have slowly started to overcome this irrational and, it would seem, deeply ingrained hang-up

The views have helped. What I love most about living up here is that I feel so close to the sky. It has given me some idea of what it must be like to be a soaring eagle or a migrating stork.

The other thing is the weather. With the possible exception of the Nyanga farm, where I grew up, I don’t think I have ever been made to feel quite so aware of it.

Every morning, I can’t wait to get out of bed to see what it is up to. It has become my raison d’etre (it must be my Scottish/Irish/English ancestry). In the Karkloof you get an awful lot of it too: no two days are ever the same. Twenty-four hours can spin itself in to a lifetime of weather, a kaleidoscope of scene changes.

It can start off sunny and end up in pouring rain. On some mornings there is no dew, but mist wreathes the clefts and ravines of the hills across the way. A cold front can arrive in the time it takes me to stroll down to the river and get back home.

I love it all. I become deeply involved in the drizzly solitudes, I am bedazzled by the constantly changing cloud formations, I never tire of the bonfire sunsets.

Indeed, if there is one thing I have learnt from this endless cycle of weather is that I am its creature and to submit to it – be it hot, cold, dry, wet, windy or misty.

Here, then, are a selection of pictures I have taken showing the changing seasons on and around Kusane Farm.

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