The Bird

DON’T think I’ve ever felt cold I like this before. There wasn’t a hint of snow anywhere but the cold went all the way down to my bones. Even here in a minibus taxi packed with plenty of warm bodies, the cold bit. I was only wearing a T-shirt and a thin tracksuit pants and hadn’t packed warmer clothes.

Why?

I thought Africa was a place where the sun was unrelentingly hot and the sky strikingly blue all year round. The movies certainly made it look that way. The prospect of warm sunny days was one of the reasons I came to South Africa.

Visiting Cape Town and seeing Table Mountain had always been on my bucket list and I jumped at the first opportunity to leave the grey skies of Ireland for a while.

My friend’s cousin, who lived in