Hah, how about this
hey! Cool beans or what. This is the latest RWW magazine. Great
little rag and well worth subscribing to. I will certainly continue
and place more adds.
On the back cover is
(top right) Dave Parrington. He is mentioned in a chapter of StP. We
went to the same school, Mount Pleasant High, Salisbury, Rhodesia and
the same swimming club. Dave (as you know), went onto represent
Zimbabwe in the 1980 Olympics as a diver.
I never could work out
what made people walk a plank freely, hop around on it like some
semi-naked crazed druggie, leap high into the air and then perform
terrible contortions of writhing pain, before piling 30 feet, head
first, into the bottom of a 15 foot deep pit full of ice water.
Madness!
Now he is a top notch
head coach in America. (And a member of FB TGK.)
Bottom left – the one
and only The Gokwe Kid, chillaxing with the last copy of RWW in
Mühldorf am Inn, Bavaria, Germany. As for my aquatic career with MP
swimming club. I hated every moment of it. All those beefy lads with
shoulders the same as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and legs that could kick
start a jumbo jet, would with gleeful shouts leap into the water and
swim faster than a starving shoal of piranhas.
Me, with my half
starved, skinny form shivering in fear, would hesitatingly put an
emaciated large toe in the water and screech as I immediately
received frostbite. At this point some bastard usually pushed me in.
Even the piranhas didn't bother wasting energy stripping a bit of
shrivelled flesh from my bones.
Two years I put up with
this torture. (I did love the trips to Beira though.) My Daddy had
wanted me to become a champion. But I finally quit after entering the
4 by 100 metres individual madly, at the annual 'let's race each
other' competition. It was supposed to last only a day but dragged on
for another two as people screamed enthusiastically at me to hurry
up.
I recall, treading
water, whilst having a breather on the second lap, shouting back -
“What is all the fuss
about? There is no one behind me!”
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