Kinky running

I have a new running partner - the Revered Hungry Kink. Kinky for short. Kinky and I go back a long way. Ok, maybe I should rephrase that - we have known each other for 35 years. We went to the same school. I was a day boy who lived just up the road with my parents. He was a boarder whose parents lived far away on a coal mine near Witbank, arguably the smelliest town in the country. I was into rugby and music, he was into wildlife photography. I was in the geography and biology class, he took art and history. Seemingly not a lot in common, but we became close friends at school and ended up spending a week hiking the 'berg together with Nobleman Shittier, and subsequently a week hiking the Wild Coast. Good times. His folks were real salt-of-the-earth South Africans. His Dad had worked his way up from being the office messenger to the mine's financial manager. He gave the three of us a lift down to the Drakensberg for our week there. I remember putting one of my Genesis tapes into the car's radio cassette player. The old boy tolerated Peter Gabriel and co. for about 20 minutes and then announced,  in inimitable South African style, "OK, let's have some white man's music!" as he turned on the radio. Priceless.

The kink studied to be a metallurgical engineer at Wits. I visited him a few times in res, played the occasional game of squash when I was up in Jozi, saw him once in a while. Then we kind of lost contact. I heard he had been G5'd out of the army because of having had one fit, ? epileptic. It never recurred but they didn't want him holding an R5 so he wasn't required to join the engineers' corps. I think he got a job on the mines or with Iscor, well paid, somewhere in the old Transvaal, but am not sure. As I said, we lost contact.

Then a few years back I was shopping at Blue Route Checkers with my two kids and this tall, thin bald guy comes up and says my name with a question mark at the end. I must have looked blank or stupid or both, because he then told me his. It was the Kink. He had moved to Cape Town and was living in Claremont. I asked him what the @#$% a metallurgical engineer was doing in Cape Town, to which he replied that he had given up being an engineer and was teaching science at a well-known private high school for boys in the mother city. He said he had had to take a 2/3 cut in salary but had never been happier.

Over the next year or so he introduced me to the art of restoring and maintaining vintage BMW motorcycles, invited me to his 40th birthday party (all I recall was that he wore a very strange wig and black tights) and promised to take me hiking up Du Toit's Peak. He also underwent surgery on both knees for shot ligaments. Then he disappeared again, chasing some woman to the UK, intent on marrying her. That too failed, and the next I heard from him was an email with a picture of him riding a very large Ducati, somewhere near a Norwegian Fjord. He does that - a few years later he sent me a similar shot from the Caprivi strip.

This is getting to be a long story so I will cut it short. The romance failed, he returned to Cape Town and his job at the boys' school, and he moved to Glen Cairn, where he had bought a rather run down but very well appointed bungalow with the most glorious view of False Bay. He proceeded to renovate the place over the next year, mostly on his own.

Given his knee issues, I was rather surprised when he told me he had started road running. "What about your knees?" I asked. He said he had read "Born to Run" by McDougall, had learned how to run on his forefeet and this had sorted out all his knee and ankle issues. Well it seemed to work - his times are substantially better than mine.

So that is the Kink. We now belong to the same running club (he had other motives for joining - his girlfriend is a leading light there). We run most Saturday mornings unless there is something else more urgent. Whereas the Handsome Masha and I discuss politics and philosophy on our runs, Kink and I talk about the old times and the old school, the quality of refereeing in the Rugby World Cup, motorbikes, and the like. Thank God for good friends.