THE LONG ROADS HOME: Taking stock, nearly eight years on from a pandemic that changed us

It’s been nearly eight years since “all that” came our way. Pandemic and imaginary journeys recited from your front room. Masks and hand washing, a premium on hospital beds. Shuttered in our homes, watching multitudes of sea birds swoop and sway above West Coast beaches on TV while the humans hide. Sourdough and banana bread and skinny people turning to fat. And the news on the breeze: so-and-so died, did you hear?

And then, before you can blink, it’s late 2026, seven-plus years after we had no idea what was just around the corner. Life slowly becomes normal again. The roads open up to us again and off we go. 

A new journey was set in motion, though we didn’t know it

Roads take us away and they bring us back home. Quite which way that is depends on the year and month. Sometimes home becomes the destination. And sometimes the destination becomes home.

In 2010, travelling from Cape Town to Cradock meant driving from home to our travel destination. At the end of that drive, a new journey was set in motion, though we didn’t know it. Now, near the end of 2026, we are a year beyond the culmination of that long, long journey.

Cradock, then, was the destination of our journey from home. Four years later it became our home and for 11 years since then, Cape Town was a holiday destination.

The day we arrived in Cradock in 2014, we met a remarkable woman, a true individual in the best sense of the word, who was to become one of our closest friends. Her name is (I hesitate to write ‘was’) Sandra Antrobus and she owed me a sheep, she said. Blamed me for the success of her business, the Tuishuise and Victoria Manor (I’d written about her fledgling venture in 1993 and forgotten about it). For years I ate it in chops. Maybe twice by now. 

Every road away from there brought us back days or weeks later, punctuated over and over again by dinners in the hotel dining room and conversations in the bar or at the fire in the reception lounge.

Sandra has gone now, and the gap in our lives is enormous.

Living in a small town for 11 years narrows down your life in one way and opens it up in others. Far away becomes closer, the near seems remote. On more occasions than you can remember, you climb in the car and you travel. 

To Graaff-Reinet or PE for a weekend, just for a change. To family in Cape Town for a kid’s birthday, a Christmas, or just “because”. Impulsive trips to Arniston, “because why not”. A few weeks later, “let’s go somewhere”, and three days later you’re meeting the family in Clarens. Cape Town, so many times, because it’s always been home, even when we lived in England, even despite the decade in the Karoo.

Family holidays, work trips to Joburg, Durban and who knows where. Back to Oranjemund in 2019 via Port Nolloth, after 49 years away. Helsinki and Lisbon, just a year apart. Festivals and reminiscences; Des Lindberg mourning his Dawn in song at our local festival, the first time he’d sung in public since her passing, and months later sitting in his darkened lounge in Plettenberg Bay, two old men talking about the then and the now, with whisky and, on the walls, paintings of a legend and life partner taken by Covid. Not that we could see them in the load shedding blackness.

The trip to Cape Town in 2015 when my English mate Phil came over. Three nights later, he’s stabbed to near death, stumbling out of a Gardens Centre lift, bloodied and crying hopelessly. He recovered, physically, but mentally he’s still troubled. There’s a chapter on it in his book, which has sold all over the world. I feel responsible, I can’t help it. It was my idea that he come over. 

A month later, back to Cape Town and meeting Branko Brkic, the start of my Daily Maverick journey. Darkness turns to light.

Food and wine take the mind off the premature grief

And suddenly, it was 2024. In that tumultuous year, I travelled far and wide. To Joburg via PE/Gqeberha, to Cape Town, and thrice to Calvinia, and on two occasions well beyond it to see my sister Pat (while she still remembers me) and boet Gerry (because the man she married slowly morphed into my true brother) in Piketberg and on to Paternoster for languid lunches at Wolfgat with chef Kobus and, this last time, Chef Johannes Richter from Durban as well.

Since I wrote the above paragraph, my sister has left us, freed from the turmoil of her deteriorating mind.

At both ends of two of the journeys from Cradock to Calvinia I spent days in the Boekehuis there, writing two separate book projects, one of which was Retro Karoo Food, now a best-seller and up for a Gourmand world cookbook award.

We went to De Rust twice, this lovely green hamlet near the mysterious entrance to the enchanting Meiringspoort at the other end of which we found the approach to Prince Albert and the inaugural Vino Camino wine festival. Our other journey took us via Calvinia to the N7 and the Cederberg, a part of the country I hardly knew at all, strangely. 

Justin Bonello was our host there, what a guy, what a mensch, as unaffected as they come, and we went on from there to Cape Town where we were spoilt at the Mount Nelson and got a taste, after a long time, of City Bowl life. 

Which is apposite, but first, back home to Cradock via the R62 and De Rust, again, this time to meet our friends Ann and Retief, who we drove via Meiringspoort next morning to Prince Albert for a long stroll along the endless main drag, and to trawl through five decades of shared stories and toast all we love. (Now there is a sadness there too, with Retief having receded in the same way my sister did.)

In Prince Albert that day, Colleen Penfold, our host for the Vino Camino visit, was in her shop and ushered us on to her stoep to become guinea pigs, she said. She had that day opened the verandah of her Prince Albert Country Stay and brought us the most delicious lemon ice cream made with Gay’s Dairy Guernsey cream, free range eggs, and Old Eden Lemon Company lemon products. Just sublime.

Back home, another long journey had been in progress since April. Days after my return from Calvinia, where I had been for three weeks, we were at the Market Street party during the annual Cradock Food Festival, when Sandra turned to me in the street, with the reception door of her hotel behind her, and asked me if I knew about her cancer. 

I… sort of did… I said, having not wanted to pry until she was ready to tell me. Then she lifted her head with something like defiance, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Tony, I Am Going to Fight This!” All in Sandra’s Capital Letters.

She would not want me to go into details, but the road she then followed was long and fraught. And it ended very badly.

One evening at Sandra’s, elder daughter Cherie said she’d heard that bone broth is good for chemotherapy patients. I climbed down a rabbit hole and found all sorts about it, which I wrote about here.

Great pots of bone broth were strained and put into tubs and frozen. Feta tubs of it lined her freezer to be thawed daily and consumed. Every second week she had to miss her chemo because the bloods weren’t right. Every day, I pictured Sandra in front of me, “I am going to fight this thing!”

But. A happy outcome was not to be.

Now we have been in Cape Town for most of a year, and this weekend we are heading back to Cradock to visit our friends there and to vote in the local municipal elections. Hoping that our pair of votes will help swing things to a brighter future for that small town.

We’ll have dinner in that gorgeous dining room at the Victoria Manor, braai at our old braai spot at our house, which we still own. And I will tell you all about it once we’re back home in Cape Town. DM