'Agree With Everything - Deny Nothing - Embellish All

Monday, January 21, 2008

Windsor Castle Revisited

I had been struggling for some days with the eccentric opening hours of South Africa's public services. My goal: buy some stamps for postcards home. Clearly the government's stealth-oriented public service strategy was paying off, because it was the best part of a week before I found the PO in the tiny settlement of Sutherland (see other posts) open at the advertised time of 0800. The clerk duly sold me a strip of stamps. It was only when I was back on the street that I noticed their design, and across the space of fifty years felt an intense and utterly unexpected rapport. The stamps were commemoratives celebrating the history of the Union Castle Line with images of their ships from the 19th and 20th centuries. Two caught my attention: the Edinburgh Castle and RMS Windsor Castle. I have intense memories as a child of visting my father when his ship was in harbour at Southampton, Glasgow or Hull. The Union Castle Line was his employer, and for a while in the 1950s and 1960s, he captained the then Edinburgh Castle and the Windsor Castle.

2 Comments:

Blogger Lex Alexander said...

Talk about a blast from the past. Is your father still with us?

21/1/08 2:47 pm  
Blogger Nick said...

Sadly no - he died in 1997 at a good age.

22/1/08 9:19 am  

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