If the scenario was frenzied before, then at this request it became absolute pandemonium! The crowd clearly hadn’t thought about this possible development, and the excitement about what I was trying to achieve was palpable! Shouts went out to find a bicycle, and within seconds one of the older guys from the workshop had produced a sturdy two-wheeled beast, not unlike the one which my Great Grandfather was leaning on in the photograph…
As I started to learn more about this man, I discovered a stash of photographs and postcards depicting his life in Khartoum in the 1930s. With this window into the past, an idea began to form in my head, an idea which, as well as matching up the past with the present, would also see me receive a wedding proposal from an old woman, and a brief period of detention at the hands of the Sudanese authorities.
Just downstream from the bridge was a slightly tired looking amusement park, normally this wouldn’t have been somewhere we would have visited, however after spying the ancient Ferris wheel slowly turning towards the sky an idea started to form in our heads, so we paid our entrance fees to the sleepy man behind the gate and made a beeline for the rusty attraction…
They say a picture paints a thousand words, well not this one; after looking at the familiar picture on my grandparents sitting room wall, I was struggling to get into double figures; I had ‘man’ and ‘moustache’ which I had quickly followed up with ‘bicycle’, ‘train’, and ‘silly hat’ (which I was definitely counting as two) but beyond that I was finding it hard to find any words to describe this unremarkable sepia image of a man in a hat – that was until I was told that the silly hatted man in question, was in fact my great grandfather.
explore v. (ɛkˈsplɔː) 1. The action of travelling through an unfamiliar area in order to learn more about it
