My mother, bless her iron soul, used to adore the Great Karoo. Perhaps I inherited my strange attraction to this vast, arid stretch of South African hinterland from her. I guess you either love or hate its harsh primordial emptiness. There’s not much space between the endless plains and the desolate sky for anything else.

She grew up on a sheep farm in the vicinity of Petrusville. When she was two years old the entire district was suffocating in the grip of an immense drought. Her father, a gifted musician who was forced to try his gentle hand at farming, walked out into the veld one night after supper in his Sunday best and shot himself. I’ve always wished that I could have met him. And in a way, she did too. She was too young to remember anything about him.