In this account of her first year of living on a houseboat in Rotterdam's Oude Haven, Valerie Poore’s overriding impression is that “one of the first things you learn about living on a boat is that an awful lot of stuff is going to end up in the water”. The year in question is 2001, and the forty something Valerie exchanges life in the fast lane of corporate Johannesburg for the charm of the Dutch waterways. Every month brings new challenges, obstacles and experiences. She meets a whole world of fascinating people, not least of whom are an endlessly smiling, but absent minded ‘landlord’, an intellectual, but quirky friend and confidante and an old world charmer whose mastery at the helm wins more than just her respect. She also learns how to cope with the sometimes strenuous demands of acting as skipper’s mate during numerous nail-biting watery adventures - quite frequently to hilarious effect!

This is the story of a young woman’s first encounters with rural South Africa. Coming from the all-mod-cons society of Britain at the beginning of the 1980’s, the author is literally transplanted to a farm in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains in what is now Kwazulu Natal - where life was considerably more primitive than the one she had come from. Once there, she finds her feet in the ways of Africa with the help of a charming, elderly Dutch couple, an appealing but wily African farm hand, his practical and motherly daughter and a wise and fascinating neighbour who has a fund of local knowledge. They are tales of a different kind of life, which include living without electricity, hand-milking cows, drought, veld fires and mad-cap adventures into the unknown, all told with affection, respect and a liberal dose of tongue-in-cheek humour.

Koos Fernhout is a prolific and diverse photographer. His special gift is in seeking out shape, colour and light. In this series, he focuses on all three but in extreme close-up. Most of these photos were taken in and around a shipyard in Belgium and no scrap of rust, oil or flaked paint escaped his attention. The result is a collection of photos of rare beauty.